YesYouNeedJesus wrote:This thread will be exclusively for AronRa and Bob Enyart to discuss phylogeny. Bob will post first on Monday the 30th. A separate thread will be created for those who want to discuss the debate.

Thank you AronRa for suggesting this debate, and Will Duffy for arranging it, and thank you to our hosts, the League of Reason team. Aron, wow, I just read your slam of me, even before we begin, claiming that I plan to "ignore all the questions, challenges, and evidence already posted against him," and continuing:

AronRa wrote:That way he can dodge the systematic refutation of everything he got wrong, which is everything he said, and he won't be forced to acknowledge any of his errors"¦ Pity Bob will not simply reply directly to this thread already created for that purpose, but as I said it's no surprise that he won't since creationists won't be held accountable. -AronRa

Ok Aron, since you're claiming I'm trying to avoid all you've already "posted against" me regarding our disagreements, I've decided to begin with the very first specific item that you blogged about against me. But first this background:

Tree of Life: Your 10th Foundational Falsehood video says that "the phylogenetic tree of life is plainly evident" via anatomy. And in the audio you give additional emphasis by adding the word "doubly," claiming that an evolutionary tree of life is "objectively doubly confirmed"¦ when re-examined genetically." And you said that "Everything we see in nature consistently adheres to everything we would expect" of "variations carried down through flowering lines of descent" from an evolutionary tree of life. Let's start small.

Charles Darwin borrowed Moses' term, the "tree of life," and both of us have written about it, as did Isaac Newton. Aron it would be a wonderfully humble way for you to begin this debate by now admitting that the brilliant scientist Isaac Newton does not belong in the naturalistic origins camp, as you've been asserting, but that he can be counted among the many fathers of the physical sciences who advocated special creation by God.

Aron's Subtle Appeal to Authority: Some points in your first foundational video were essentially an appeal to authority that you never identified as such. You agreed that our interview could begin by talking about honest inquiry, so I thought your appeal was at least worthy of a counterclaim. You stated, "There is a complete consensus among scientists all over America"¦ that evolution is the backbone of modern biology"¦" I responded, not to directly dispute your claim, but to offer some contrasting evidence to your appeal to authority, that:

If we are to count scientists according to their origins view, as you were doing in your video, it was surprising then that you refused to agree that Isaac Newton should be included in the special creation camp. You interrupted me from quickly listing off scientists before and after Darwin, including Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Cuvier, and Dalton before, and after Darwin, Faraday, Mendel, Pasteur, Joule, Kelvin, Lister, and Carver, who along with many others, continued to reject evolution and advocate for special creation.

Yet you then verbally, and later in writing, denied the overwhelmingly clear fact extensively documented by leading science historians and from any perusal online of Newton's belief system or writings, that Isaac Newton should be included among special creationists.

Now I'm asking you, on the simplest of matters, to adhere to the general principle that you opened your blog with:

AronRa wrote:"¦in any live discussion of this topic, both sides may cite points in their favor which the other side is unable to examine or verify on the fly, and neither of us should get away with making indefensible assertions just to sound right on radio. Accuracy and accountability matter more. That is why Enyart and I agreed at the end that we would have a written debate in this forum pertaining to the points raised live on the air. We both made several claims relating to scientific research, and we both accused the other of being unread, out-of-date, or of misinterpreting or misrepresenting that data. Now we have time to re-examine each of the specific points made on that show, and show how accurate those arguments really were. -AronRa

AronRa wrote:I don't know if Enyart can show that Newton ever denied any natural explanation in favor of an inexplicable miracle. Neither do I think he can show where Newton wrote 'extensively' about this"¦ -AronRa

The Creationist Isaac Newton: Aron, I tried to remind you on air that:- Newton held that God specially created the two first humans, Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden- Newton wrote extensively to show the correctness of the biblical chronology starting with the Creation (including his 370-page The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms)- Newton believed specifically that the one true God, by His divine will, specially created the earth- Newton rejected the possibility of a naturalistic origin of the solar system- Newton held that God specially created the solar system in full operation, along with the entire cosmos- Newton admired Bishop Ussher's work and defended the literal date of creation of the entire cosmos as occurring about 4,000 B.C.

In one of scores of possible examples of Newton's worldview, on February 11, 1692 (or 1693), Newton wrote to Richard Bentley:

Isaac Newton wrote:The Hypothesis of deriving the frame of the world by mechanical principles from matter eavenly spread through the heavens being inconsistent with my systeme, I had considered it very little before your letters put me upon it, & therefore trouble you with a line or two more about it if this come not too late for your use. In my former I {represented} that the diurnal rotations of the Planets could not be derived from gravity but required a divin{e} power to impress them. And tho gravity might give the Planets a motion of descent towards the Sun either directly or with some little obliquity, yet the transverse motions by which they revolve in their several orbs required the divine Arm to impress them according to the tangents of their orbs I would now add that the Hypothesis of matters being at first eavenly spread through the heavens is, in my opinion, inconsistent with the Hypothesis of innate gravity without a supernatural power to reconcile them, & therefore it infers a Deity. For if there be innate gravity its impossible now for the matter of the earth & all the Planets & stars to fly up from them & become eavenly spread throughout all the heavens without a supernatural power. & certainly that which can never be hereafter without a supernatural power could never be heretofore without the same power.,Isaac Newton

Aron, in refusing to list Newton among creationists, you created a definition:

AronRa wrote:I defined creationists as those who reject evolution specifically and methodological naturalism in general, defying the scientific method in favor of a magical creation instead. -AronRa

Of course, Newton did not need to know about Darwin nor genetics to reject biblical creation, and to agree, for example, with the ancient Greek philosophical claim of an eternal universe (which would have made unnecessary his defense of special creation by God). Newton was a creationist.

So even by your definition Aron, Newton rejected alternative origins claims and believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible. He thereby inherently rejected "methodological naturalism" (which by circular reasoning would have denied in principle Isaac Newton's right to publish the above, or countless other conclusions, in a scientific journal).

And Aron, I realize that you are strongly committed to the tactic of comparing the biblical belief (held by Newton, etc.) in supernatural intervention to a belief in magic. But I think you might be aware that magic, per say, is not limited by reality, logic, or truth. So a god of magic could be presented, unlike the God of the Bible, as:- changing the past- simultaneously existing and not existing- making duplicates of himself- arbitrarily making it a virtue to hate him

The Bible defines faith as the proper response to "the evidence of things not seen," and says that we should "reason together," and claims that "truth" exists, and so whereas "magic" could entertain contradiction, the biblical notion of the reality and rationality of the cosmos, and the logical law of non-contradiction are, as in the eyes of Isaac Newton and many modern science philosophers and historians, the very enabling concepts for the exercise of the scientific endeavor. So if you are going to continue to equate the God of the Bible with magic, perhaps you can remember to qualify your claim and indicate where the two are different.

BE-Question #1: AronRa, I'm asking you to now agree that if you are going to list scientists by their claims on origins, that you will list Isaac Newton among the literal creationists. Agreed?

Your answer here will affect our debate. I promise to try to demonstrate humility to admit error where I can see that you have corrected me. (I do this regularly, as at KGOV.com/errata.) If you likewise can indicate a change of heart and agree on such a small matter, then that may enable us to more effectively test your essential claim that anatomy, the fossil record, and everything in nature, including genetic pathways, adhere to what we would expect from an evolutionary tree of life. After all, if the evidence for natural origins is strong, there should be no need to exaggerate claims.

In the interests of getting this debate rolling, I'm inviting either Aron or Bob to make their opening post on the subject of phylogeny. With regards to this thread Newton is not relevant, so instead of arguing over this digression shall we get the debate going? Thank you.

Although I will be happy to debate phylogeny after the primary points here are settled, this debate is not about that. That was the topic of a live discussion between creationist pastor Bob Enyart and myself of his radio talk show, "Real" Science Friday. The debate here in this forum however is over the academic accuracy of the claims made by both sides during that show. Of course that means the first post logically must contain a summary of each of the contested points, which it did. Yet I am accused of having begun this discussion 'before' it began -by posting when I was supposed to. I was also criticized for having listed all of Bob's errors appropriately,as if it is my fault that he made so many blunders after four hours of false accusations, erroneous assertions, quote-mining, and distorting data. It was a thankless job having to transcribe the whole seven part interview, only to have all of it summarily ignored. Rather than properly address any of the challenges or queries in the thread already created for this purpose, Bob chose to create a whole new thread so that he could pretend to have posted first,and so that he can try to change the subject -while making me re-post all the evidence and arguments previously presented in a more coherent format.

Many times in our discussion,both live and now here as well- Bob has tried to project his own faults onto me. He charged me with being "committed" to a "tactic",which he clearly is, and I am obviously not. He falsely accused me of holding the same sort of biases that he does, where I seek to minimize or eliminate bias. He also accused me of making fallacious arguments which only he uses. For example, while I argue from demonstrable fact, Bob tries to appeal to authority instead, and he imposes this onto me too,by insisting that whatever fact I present be endorsed by 'leading' experts in whatever field it happens to relate to. However when it is his turn, he argues from false authority.

Case in point, I cited statistics showing that 99.86% of geologists and biologists (zoologists, embryologists, geneticists, etc) accept evolution. This shouldn't be surprising since those are the most relevant fields. I made this statement to counter the age-old creationist lie that scientists are allegedly abandoning evolution,when the opposite has obviously been the case for centuries. However Bob attempted to counter this by claiming that some unspecified number of medical doctors don't accept evolution. Even if Bob was right about that -which he isn't- it wouldn't matter as his list are not authorities in that field.

In part one of our discussion, Bob claimed that Johann Kepler and Isaac Newton both rejected methodological naturalism where the laws of planetary motion were concerned. I don't know about Newton, but this is famously not true of Kepler. The 3rd episode of Cosmos (Harmony of Worlds) is dedicated to how Kepler gave up trying to reconcile his beliefs against facts which would not accommodate his faith. I doubted whether Bob could show that Newton wrote extensively about denying naturalism when Newton is famous for composing natural laws, but I also said that it wouldn't be necessarily relevant to either of our positions even if he did. Bob somehow interpreted my lack of interest in the religious ignorance of 18th century alchemists to be a "denial of overwhelmingly clear facts extensively documented" by 'leading' science authorities. No, I do not deny overwhelmingly clear facts like Bob does. I said that I never read Newton,and I haven't. Nor would it matter one way or the other, and I said that too.

Bob tried to claim credibility for creationism within the scientific community by citing several pre-Darwinian scientists as creationists. I myself have described such people (like Carl Linn for example) as being 'essentially' creationist,in that they believed in Biblical fables before anyone knew any better. However not having any scientific alternative does not put pioneer scientists in the same class as modern creationists who oppose science altogether, seeking to undermine understanding according to a prior commitment to promote or defend a belief in magic instead.

And no Bob, there is no difference between Biblical miracles and magic. When a wealthy man is neurotic, he is called eccentric.When a VIP is murdered, it's called an assassination.When a deity performs magic, it's called a miracle. Magic and miracles are exactly the same thing. Look it up.

As I pointed out on Bob's show, all creationist organizations adhere to a doctrinal obligation wherein they assert as fact that which is not evidently true, and where they decide,in advance- to automatically and thoughtlessly reject any and all evidence that might ever be presented, should it appear to contradict their dogmatism. Both of these positions are of course wholly dishonest, and I told Bob that consequently few, if any of the scientists he listed could be shown to hold that sort of position.

For example, Francis Bacon invented scientific methodology, so he obviously didn't reject it. He also argued that matters of faith and natural science should be kept separate. Copernicus and Galileo were both famously charged with heresy when they challenged the church's authority regarding geocentricity.

The first criteria of creationism is that one reject evolutionary principles. But Georg Cuvier,father of paleontology- upset contemporary clergy by recognizing the geologic column (which Bob rejects) and its indication that whole species have gone extinct before our time, (which Bob also rejects). Louis Pasteur reportedly accepted evolution, albeit without Darwinian mechanisms, and he disproved the Lutheran belief that diseases were caused by demons. Gregor Mendel actually supported Darwinian evolution. In fact Mendel's contribution brought about the modern Mendelo-Darwinian synthesis. Bob knew this and even admitted it on the air, yet now he contradicts himself by saying that Mendel rejected evolution?! Bullshit, Bob! Put this in your errata.

Most amusingly Bob tried to cite the laws of thermodynamics as being opposed to, or a challenge for evolution, and he also lists Lord Kelvin on his side. However Kelvin invented those laws, and yet he said that evolution was "not unscientific". So obviously those laws do not present the challenge that Bob thought they should. Kelvin also disproved young earth creationism,with thermodynamics! What was the minimum age Kelvin said that the world had to be, Bob?

I doubt I could say that none of these alchemists and astrologers and such were creationists. Obviously I accept that Blaise Pascal was,since his most notable contribution was a logical fallacy. But Bob (amazingly) accepted my much stricter definition of creationism. This would require that even if Newton had the advantage of modern education and knowledge of all the relevant data acquired since his time, he would still reject it all and defend the fables in Genesis even where he could see that they had been proven wrong. Whether that is the case or not, we'll never know.

I did not "refuse to admit" whether Newton was a strict creationist -as Bob accuses. Where adequate explanation was required, Bob simply failed to provide one. Remember that Bob also thinks it is possible to contribute to science by rejecting scientific methodology, and that to say otherwise is a 'circular argument'. Bob still has not shown Newton to have been that intellectually dishonest. He may have believed gravity to be insufficient on its own to explain planetary patterns, but that doesn't mean he rejected all natural explanations simply because they are natural. However if Wikipedia is accurate, then Newton pleaded for a literal interpretation of Genesis as the "word of God", which he said he would not deny. So he did admit to the doctrinal Obligation I complained about earlier. He is also said to have believed himself to be one of select few chosen by God to receive special revelation regarding the scriptures. That is easily irrational enough to qualify as a creationist even by the strictest definition! Amusingly it also seems that Newton agreed with me by rejecting the trinity and considering the worship of Jesus to be damnable idolatry. I would love to read that piece of work. I would also like to see how Bob would challenge Newton's claim to have a divinely enhanced and thus superior understanding of scripture than Bob has.

That said, I must contest Bob on one other point in his first post here; the definition of faith. According to a consensus of every authoritative source, dictionaries, hymns, collective philosophers, sermons of theologians past and present, and even scripture (both eastern and Abrahamic) faith is juxtaposed to reason of evidence. Faith is an unsupported assertion of stoic conviction which is assumed without reason and defended against all reason. That is why I have to reject faith as inherently auto-deceptive.

Part one of our discussion ended with a challenge to Bob regarding his own rejection of necessarily naturalist methodology. Name one time in the history of science when supernatural explanations ever proved to be correct, or actually improved our understanding of anything, rather than impeding or retarding all progress, as I believe has always been the case.

Part two explained the inequity of our two positions, and ended with me repeating a previous challenge which he failed to answer. Ignoring for a moment the thousands of creationist arguments which have all been proven wrong as many times, yet are still being presented on YEC websites around the world, can you show me one verifiably accurate argument, positively indicative of miraculous creation over biological evolution?

In part three, I provided exactly that on behalf of evolution. While we were on the air, Bob agreed that it is a fact that evolution happens; that biodiversity and complexity do increase, that both occur naturally according to the laws of population genetics amid environmental dynamics.

Bob agreed that it is a fact that alleles vary with increasing distinction in reproductive populations, and that these are accelerated in genetically isolated groups.

Bob agreed that it is a fact that natural selection, sexual selection, and genetic drift have all been proven to have predictable effect in guiding this variance both in scientific literature and in practical application.

Bob agreed that it is a fact that significant beneficial mutations do occur and are inherited by descendant groups, and that several independent sets of biological markers do exist which trace these lineages backwards over myriad generations.

Bob does not accept the fact that birds are a subset of dinosaurs, in the same way that ducks are a subset of birds, and that humans are a subset of apes in exactly the same way that lions are a subset of cats, but as I said, it is easy enough to prove, and I'll be happy to do that to his satisfaction here in this forum.

He didn't let me get to the rest of these, and ignored where I posted them previously, but we'll need him to agree or disagree with each of the facts below before I can proceed.

It is a fact that the collective genome of all animals has been traced to its most basal form through reverse-sequencing, and that those forms are also indicated by comparative morphology, physiology, and embryological development, as well as through chronologically correct placement of successive stages revealed in the geologic column.

It is a fact that every animal on earth has obvious relatives either living nearby or evident in the fossil record, and that the fossil record holds hundreds of clearly transitional species even according to the strictest definition of that term.

It is a fact that both microevolution and macroevolution have been directly-observed and documented dozens of times, both in the lab and in naturally-controlled conditions in the field, and that these instances have all withstood critical analysis in peer-review.

It is also a fact that evolution is the only explanation of biodiversity with either evidentiary support or measurable validity, and that no would-be alternate notion has ever met even one of the criteria required of a scientific theory.

I also explained that positive claims require positive evidence, and that assertions not supported by evidence may be dismissed without evidence -as they do not yet merit serious consideration. I explained that it is impossible to prove a negative claim, but that one also cannot have a sum or product of an equation when there is no available data to compute. Then I showed how AndromedasWake refuted Bob's claim of a geocentric universe. I also showed how Bob misrepresented Ann Gibbons, who did NOT say that Mitochondrial Eve was 6,000 years old "according to documented mutation rates". I also challenged Bob to explain why he refuses to accept any of the data which all consistently shows an African origin for all humanity.

Part three ended with Bob's assertion that I could either not present any precursors for dinosaurs or could not cite any scientists who agreed with whatever I might suggest. I answered that challenge with a succession of fossil precursors endorsed by an international team of paleontologists. Put this in your errata.

In part four, Bob claimed an alternative model to Big Bang cosmology -which does not exist, and he said it was concordant with the creationists' model of the universe -which also does not exist. I defended myself against Bob's accusation of having misrepresented Laurence Krauss by showing where Krauss also refuted Bob's claim of a geocentric universe. Part four ended with my challenge to Bob to admit that leading cosmologists disagree with him on both of his key points, (1) That there apparently is no center of the universe either indicated by a lack of data or supported by the data that we actually do have, and (2) that the red shift quantization he pleaded for is an illusion, that it is otherwise concordant with the big bang, and thus is not an alternative cosmological model.

In part five, I showed that Y-Chromosome Adam evidently lived 140,000 years ago, and that a genetic bottleneck in the human lineage was traced to 74,000 years ago, not the 4,000 years that Bob claimed for both of these. Put this in your errata. I proved that Bob had absolutely no idea what he was talking about with regard to our genetic similarity to sponges or our genomic orthologue with chimpanzees, specifically relating to the Y-chromosome. Put this in your errata. I challenged Bob to show that there were ever any mammoths found frozen with tropical flora anywhere near them. Bob claims to have answered this challenge, but he has not. He only cited what he and I had already agreed upon, that there were lots of bones that were neither flash-frozen nor associated with anything tropical. Bob also said mammoths could not possibly survive in the environments where millions of them are known to have lived and I refuted his claims about those conditions too. Put this in your errata.

In part six, Bob was supposed to answer my phylogeny challenge, but instead he deliberately distorted an already poorly-presented and intentionally misleading article from a sensationalized British magazine. Bob also accused me of never having read the article even though I remembered what it said off the top of my head, and he got all of the details in that article wrong. The article was about horizontal gene transfer, it did focus primarily on microbes, and was not about human DNA. Nor did it offer any significant challenge to the "tree-of-life" -at least where that pertains to multicellular organsisms, and especially animals.

My challenge to Bob there was to refute what I showed about overlapping morphology, physiology, and fossils confirming canineandfeline evolution, and the phylogeny challenge where genomic sequencing confirmed the relationships determined by most morphological estimates, but also exposed and corrected errors in classifying bats, aardvarks, and pangolins.

Bob also tried to dismiss the strictest consensus definition of 'transitional species' as "invalid" based on his own gross misunderstanding of taxonomy, and his refusal to honestly admit that anything ever fit that description, much less hundreds of species. This is a point we'll come back to shortly.

Finally Bob asserted that the ancestry of turtles was 'supposed' in lieu of evidence, and that the evolution of flowering plants, backbones, bats, fish, and trees were all similarly 'unknown', and that I could find no reliable science sources to contest his assertion in any of these instances. I proved otherwise on all counts. Since he was especially emphatic about the turtles, he should put this in his errata.

In the 7th and final segment of our discussion, Bob accused me of not knowing why Rhodocetus and Pakicetus were considered related to whales. He said this even after I explained about the diagnostic traits in each of their skulls. Bob accused paleontologist, Phillip Gingrich of 'recanting' this fossil,which he did not, and of rendering this animal as a fish,which he did not. Put this in your errata.

Bob's challenge there was to explain whether Pakicetus and Rodhocetus still have cetacean traits regardless whether they still had legs or not?

Throughout our exchange so far, Bob has made many indefensible quips,like when he said that octopods had human eyes,even though their retina are reversed. For the sake of brevity, I will let Bob off all the other errors not listed in this post,unless he repeats them. Neither will I try to force him to admit he was wrong on every point listed here that hasn't yet been adequately proved, other than those highlighted of course. To prevent waffling, I would rather he respond by listing the points he still thinks he can defend, and anything not included in that list will be taken as concession.

Once we have settled the matter we both agreed to on the air, then we'll resume our debate on phylogeny. Perhaps Bob might even try to address my phylogeny challenge -if he ever found out what the challenge is.

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true." - Friedrich Nietzsche. "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." - Mark Twain

Aron, thanks so much for all the effort you are putting into this. If you're willing to, please feel free to post or email the transcript of our interviews, and I'll be happy to post it at our Real Science Friday site. Also, in my opening post above, I addressed the first issue you listed elsewhere claiming that I was incorrect (about Newton being a creationist). I tend to take things in order, and to have opponents take turns making challenges. So in this post:- I'll take on your next criticism, on statistics, which is the first matter you listed in your opening post in this debate thread, then,- I'll play your audio (via a link) and challenge the claim you made on our radio program that I was wrong to state that T. rex soft tissue has been discovered (and from a Hadrosaur, etc.), with this original biological material surviving from the dinosaur era (as now repeatedly confirmed by peer-review).

I'm sure you agree with me that it's an honor to have folks take time out of their lives to follow our debate here and to comment on it. Regarding that, I'll ask you for a favor. If any of our readers attack me:- for not addressing all of your challenges in this single post, or- for not yet getting to Phylogeny, or- for including my own examples of what I believe your errors were (limiting these to topics covered on our radio shows), I'd like to ask you to defend me in such matters and to ask them to focus on the substance of the points being contested. Thanks!

ARON CLAIMS BOB IS UNTRUSTWORTHY WITH HIS STATISTICS: "Even if Bob was right about that -which he isn't"

AronRa said that I argue from false authority, which is interesting since the Finkelstein study he links to is the exact same study that I used and his link supports my 34% of physicians who prefer intelligent design over evolution. (I now wish I had linked to that study directly rather than indirectly as I did via my interview with ID's Jonathan Witt about the book he co-wrote with William Dembski, Intelligent Design Uncensored, which also references the same study from the Louis Finkelstein Institute). Aron wrote:

AronRa: "Bob attempted to counter this by claiming that some unspecified number of medical doctors don't accept evolution. Even if Bob was right about that -WHICH HE ISN'T- it wouldn't matter"¦" [caps added]

Clicking on Aron's link does not show I was wrong but presents the same study I used showing that "63 percent -- believe the theory of evolution over that of intelligent design." And so by subtracting 63% from 100%, and allowing for the obligatory 3% who can never seem to answer a survey question, you're left with a balance of 34% which, is the number published elsewhere from the same study and the number I therefore quoted. So Aron has not disproved but confirmed what I wrote, that:

I'll ask Aron to do what I will also promise to do: not to make knee-jerk assumptions that our opponent is wrong on particular details without confirming the error. Light fact-checking on this would have confirmed for Aron that he was linking to the same stats he criticized me for posting, and that would have spared us all the first half of this, my Round Two post.

Yes, the percentage of educated people, scientists or doctors who believe in evolution, or in aliens (as most atheists do), or for that matter in geocentrism (as Plato did), does not indicate the truth or falsehood of such assertions. And Aron, I agree with your claim that the majority of scientists believe in evolution, as I wrote, "not to directly dispute your claim, but to offer some contrasting evidence."

If you would have looked at the study that we both were referring to, you would have seen why I said "a large percent," and didn't give an exact number, because the reports I have on the study, as I've summarized in my interview with Witt, indicate:

[The pro-evolution Finkelstein Institute has now removed from the web their complete 2007 study data that previously had been widely linked to.]

Aron, it only takes a few words for you to:- say that "Enyart is Wrong" and then without you or the readers realizing it, to- link to the same study I did as your evidence against me.Whereas, it takes me many words to refute your broad-brush accusation which implies that as a creationist I am expected to be untrustworthy and unable or unwilling to even get a simple statistic right.

Yet, as is easily done with figures unless great caution is taken, you made a statistical methodological error, and thereby you presented a severely erroneous and fabricated statistic. You wrote:

Aron, there was no such statistic to cite. You calculated that 99.86% figure using an invalid method, for it was not the result of any survey or poll, scientific or otherwise, but from a "count" of creationists of 700 (out of an estimated 480,000 U.S. scientists). I believe that I can tell you the source of the number 700 even though the page you link to, and the others like it online, present a single quote from a June 29, 1987 Newsweek article, which article itself does not appear online, and none of the cites identify the source of the number 700. (Since this error is so widely repeated by evolutionists, I've just written to the University of Texas which houses the Newsweek research archives to get more information to put this to bed once for all.) The number 700 almost certainly comes from the number of scientists who were then members of the Creation Research Society (for which my Real Science Friday co-host Fred Williams is webmaster). Regardless of where they got their count from however, Aron, your methodological error was to take someone's "count" of creationist scientists, which was not a PERCENT from a survey, but someone's COUNT and then use that against the number of total scientists, which is an invalid methodology.

Here's what Aron did: It's like an organization counting all the atheists they can find who have ever heard of AronRa, and then dividing the number of atheists in America by the number they counted, and proclaiming that 99.976% of atheists have never even heard of the guy. Aron would object (and not only because a "margin of error" cannot even be calculated for such a method). Rather, to do this "scientifically," they would survey a certain number of atheists, the magnitude of which will help determine the poll's margin of error, and ask that group if they've heard of Aron, and then calculate the number of atheists acquainted with Aron NOT by the total number of atheists, but by the number of atheist respondents, divided by the percent who said they had heard of him, which might easily produce a result 400 times greater than the invalid methodology. And Aron might be happier.

Finally, instead of Aron claiming that such a tiny percent, of 0.14% of scientists rejecting evolution, "shouldn't be surprising," he should intuitively be able to see that as a gross underestimate merely by considering the many famous scientists of the last few decades reported as rejecting Darwin, and for each famous former Darwinist there is likely to be many less-well-known counterparts, and then there's the many scientists (including the Smithsonian's Richard Sternberg who I enjoyed meeting for dinner after a day excavating dinosaur fossils in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana) who have lost their jobs for questioning Darwinism.

So Aron, 0.14% would be surprisingly low, as expected also by identifying the nature of the error in your statistical methodology, and so your claim of 0.14% is invalid, and should be corrected.

CONFIRMED DINOSAUR TISSUE DISCOVERIES UNKNOWN TO ARONRA: Long ago I lost my expectation that educated evolutionists would be excited and up-to-date about what may be among the top biological discoveries of the 21st century: the widespread finds and peer-reviewed confirmation of original dinosaur soft tissue. Instead, after talking to scores of them, they tend to be uninterested, unread, and out-of-date on the topic, and therefore claim they that the many finds are some kind of contamination like "biofilm," which would be a more recently-formed bacterial residue rather than what it really is, actual, not decomposed, dinosaur tissue.

For this point I can postpone until later the implications of dinosaur soft tissue. Right now I'm only presenting Aron's false assertion he made to our radio audience that "You don't have original biological material" from dinosaurs. (Of course on a topic of such significance, this also relates to Aron's frequent accusation that creationists are the ones who are out-of-date). So let's see which of us was up-to-date and excited about the latest scientific observations (as transcribed from this 1.5 minute audio segment which started 27 minutes into our third program):

Bob Enyart: The soft tissue that we find, the Tyrannosaurus Rex that we've got original biological material [from, and] then they found it in a Mosasaur that's [allegedly] 80 million years old. Then they found it in...

Bob Enyart: Well you need to read the last five years worth of referreed scientific journals including from everywhere... in Nature, Science, PLoS -- Public Library of Science, [PNAS, etc.]

AronRa: [dismissive laughter]

Bob Enyart: Ten universities [and institutes] just published a report, in the U.S. and [Europe], leading universities, I can list them for you, saying we have absolutely ruled out contamination. This is not biofilm. This is original...

AronRa: Are you going to argue that you have blood cells? ... I'm not even going to argue this for the moment. I've covered this in my series.

Aron, here are four of the dinosaur soft-tissue discoveries which now have been widely confirmed, beginning with the first T. rex find:

65 Million: THE FIRST BIG FIND, These Photos are of Allegedly "65-million" Year Old T. rex Soft Tissue: North Carolina State University paleontologist Mary Schweitzer discovered original biological tissue from a T. rex thighbone excavated in Montana, with transparent and pliable blood vessels containing what looks like red blood cells. Stunning dinosaur photos can be seen at MS-NBC along with reports of the finds such as in a 2007 Nat'l Geographic report. In 2011 ten leading universities and institutes including Harvard, the University of Manchester, and the University of Pennsylvania published in a peer-reviewed journal their verification that presumed dinosaur material is indeed original biological material from a dinosaur. Combined with the research on Egyptian mummies that established 10,000 years as an upper limit for how long such biological molecules could survive, and with the following photos of actual T. rex flexible blood vessels and cells, for such reasons creationists refer to dinosaurs as missionary lizards.

PZ Myers: In being uninformed about the many developments confirming these T. rex, etc. photos as original dinosaur tissue, and doubting these discoveries even when hearing about the widespread publications, AronRa committed what has become a common error even with leading evolutionists like PZ Myers, who also falsely hoped that the findings were not dinosaur tissue but contamination, as PZ said to me when recently addressing our RSF Trochlea Challenge.

And now to the Mosasaur find...

And in soft-tissue view:

70 Million: ANOTHER BIG FIND, Iron-clad "Dinosaur-era" tissue from an Allegedly "70-million year old" Mosasaur: See soft-tissue images including the one above in Science Daily and consider this PLoS peer-reviewed report by researchers including from Lund University in Sweden and Southern Methodist University in Dallas with scientists confirming another, allegedly dinosaur-era, biological tissue discovery using sophisticated techniques to rule out modern contamination, bio-film, etc., concluding that original biological collagen exists in a small bone from an extinct marine reptile called a Mosasaur. Yet according to a report in Science Magazine as it relates to the discoveries of dinosaur tissue, scientists calculate the maximum survival time of collagen not in millions but in thousands of years. (And of course tests so far show that there's plenty of Carbon-14 in these dinosaur specimens, and what would your guess be about whether the left-handedness of the amino acids present have yet returned to their non-living ratio of 50/50 handedness?)

80 Million: AND ANOTHER BIG FIND, More Soft Dinosaur Tissue, This Time From an "80 Million" Year Old Hadrosaur: This image, from National Geographic appears with with their account of the find, and the journal Science presents yet another discovery of soft tissue in a dinosaur. This time it's from a Hadrosaur, with soft blood vessels, connective tissue, and blood cell protein amino acid chains partially sequenced at Harvard University. Harvard, North Carolina State University, et al., wanted to get some soft dinosaur tissue so they put together a team and just went out and found some! Consider all the potential soft tissue, and perhaps even dinosaur DNA, lost to humanity because of the disbelief (as with AronRa, even after years of discoveries and countless confirmations) of leading evolutionary scientists and their refusal even to look for non-decomposed original biological tissue inside of dinosaur bones.

150 Million: AND NOW THIS, Soft Tissue in an Allegedly "150-Million" Year Old Archaeopteryx: One would think that these soft-tissue dinosaur finds would be trumpeted as the scientific discovery of our age. But so many evolutionists whom we talk to at RSF: 1) have never even heard of these developments 2) initially deny them 3) assume that it must be creationists who claim to have found them, and 4) repeat, as Aron and PZ Myers did, the repeatedly debunked claims that these are not dinosaur tissue but contamination.

So now, from the mother lode of evolutionary dogma, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, comes this report that scientists have found various types of original biological material in archaeopteryx feathers and bones, biological material that allegedly has survived for 150 million years, including proof their feathers were colored "black" from the still extant melanosomes that produced melanin).

Turn the Tables: Could anyone on League of Reason deny the mockery that would be poured out on a poor Christian who, desperately trying to defend his world view, somehow was reduced to claiming that biological, translucent, and flexible dinosaur blood vessels survived without decomposing for 65 million years in sandstone in Montana?

So Aron, here are my questions, repeating my first which I think you forgot to answer:

BE-Question #1, NEWTON THE CREATIONIST: AronRa, learning of Newton's belief that God created the world as revealed in Scripture about 4,000 years before Christ, and having read in my first post above Newton's words of commitment to divine origins and his principled rejection of naturalistic origins, I'm asking you to agree that you were wrong to devise a definition of a "creationist" to try and justify your claim that Newton was not a creationist, and so to agree that if you are going to list scientists by their claims on origins, that you will list Isaac Newton among the literal creationists. Agreed?

BE-Question #2, TRUSTWORTHY STATISTICS: Aron, since I was referring to the same study you were, which study affirmed my statement that a large percent of U.S. doctors reject strict Darwinism including 34% who prefer intelligent design, will you now agree to withdraw that particular criticism of yours against me?

BE-Question #3, DENYING DINOSAUR SOFT TISSUE: Aron, will you agree that my presentation to you on the radio of the soft-tissue dinosaur finds was valid, and that your claim that I was wrong about this was a result of you being out-of-date with the latest science, and that therefore I was correct when I asserted that there have been multiple published findings of original dinosaur (and dinosaur era) biological tissue, and that you wrongly denied what now is widely-reported and peer-reviewed objective science on dinosaur tissue?

I must apologize everyone. In the very little time I have left anymore, I had to compose and present two different lectures at two different college events one week apart from each other. One of them was on phylogeny! That's why it took me two weeks to post my reply here, even though there really wasn't much of anything to reply to.

BobEnyart wrote:Aron, in my opening post above, I addressed the first issue you listed elsewhere claiming that I was incorrect (about Newton being a creationist).

I never made that claim. I explained that referring to pre-Darwinian scientists as creationists is not a fair statement if you're arguing for the validity of creationism, because there is no way to know whether those scientists would have denied evolutionary evidence discovered since then, and creationists do openly admit that they will automatically and thoughtless reject any and all evidence that might ever arise -if they perceive that as a threat to their a-priori pre-conceived notions. All creationist organizations make this admission as if such dishonesty were something to be proud of. But no scientific institution would tolerate confirmation bias, and neither should pre-Darwinian scientists who might only have believed in creation in the absence of any other option yet presented.

AronRa said that I argue from false authority, which is interesting since the Finkelstein study he links to is the exact same study that I used and his link supports my 34% of physicians who prefer intelligent design over evolution.

Of course it is the same study. Why would I look for a different study for the same data? How many polls should I expect to find asking this exact question to this identical demographic? If I did find a different study, one that showed different data, how would that have been relevant?

The point is that your citation concerns medical doctors, not paleontologists, zoologists, botanists, embryologists, virologists, anatomists, anthropologists, or any other field of biology or geology relevant to, and thus authoritive regarding evolution. So you claim false authority. Not only that, but you claimed a 'large' percentage, but it turned out that only about a third of these non-evolutionary physicians still believe in superstitious alternatives opposed to mainstream science. That is not a 'large' percent, especially here in the US. It is a two-to-one minority in a set with only two options. Compare that with the general populace, and you'll see that as education increases, your audience decreases. No surprises there.

I will however agree on one point; the mere percentage of people who accept or agree with any given idea does not in itself indicate the truth or accuracy of that position, at least not when you're talking about persons without much knowledge of those fields, or who had never even heard of those positions. So your first two points were already nullified. Your subsequent summary showing the obvious biases according to religious preconceptions further proves my point. That's why I said I would I would make my case with facts rather than statistics.

you made a statistical methodological error, and thereby you presented a severely erroneous and fabricated statistic.

No I didn't. If I remember correctly, the article specifically addressed the list of scientists who reject evolution, and compared them to a poll of biologists and geologists specifically. I could have cited any number of other polls to show the same level of support for evolution, and the correlations between acceptance of evolution and education, etc. The real point is that while creationism is apparently a matter of pure fantasy without any verifiable accuracy or practical application on any point, evolution conversely is a demonstrably accurate and inescapable fact of population genetics with benefits extending across many fields. That's why experts in those fields overwhelmingly accept that it is real, because they can prove that it is. That's I intend to do for you too -if we can ever get on with this debate.

It would be great if we could actually discuss the facts of phylogeny rather than whatever people believed before anyone knew better, or what an indoctrinated minority still believes even when they should know better.

We're supposed to limit this debate to the errors you made while I was on your radio show. Introducing new errors on top of those would not be a good idea.

CONFIRMED DINOSAUR TISSUE DISCOVERIES UNKNOWN TO ARONRA

This reminds me of gossip tabloids having titles purporting to the tell "the untold story". Your account is no more reliable than those. You've also gotten it backwards. The discoveries are known to me, but the soft tissue you claimed was never confirmed.

As I already told you, I had already read Schweitzer's paper. I also know one of the guys on her team, and we talked a lot about a couple years ago. He told me that Schweitzer and Horner both liked to stir up controversy, but that what she found was none the less significant, because it forced a vast improvement of our earlier understanding of fossilization. My impression was this, she showed that very large bones, properly buried under the right conditions could effectively insulate the core sufficiently that isolated microscopic sections could contain original material not fully fossilized, meaning that demineralization might restore some original properties. Chemical decomposition would of course occur even then, (much the pity) so that these wouldn't be exactly what they were anymore, but the implications were still exciting to me at the time. That's when I saw a documentary wherein Schweitzer and Horner confirmed their hypothesis on a second very large femur buried under similar conditions.

The first I had ever heard of this was the story you cited"providing molecular support for the hypothesis that modern birds are descended from dinosaurs".[i/] Soon afterward came the creationists' claims of them having found actual blood cells and so on. But it turned out this never happened. Somehow creationists had turned [i]"seven fragmentary chains of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins" into full-blown DNA ready for cloning.

I will grant that -once demineralized- these may again be 'soft' compared to the surrounding matrix, and I will grant that the word 'tissue' would apply to these structures regardless what they were made of. But you said these were original biological material, implying that they had not been fossilized at all, that they retained their original chemical composition, and were perhaps even still edible, and none of that is correct in any of the instances you listed. There are traces of original chemicals, especially hardier elements like metals and so on.

Long ago I lost my expectation that educated evolutionists would be excited and up-to-date about what may be among the top biological discoveries of the 21st century: the widespread finds and peer-reviewed confirmation of original dinosaur soft tissue.

Long ago, I lost my expectation that creationists were ever actually excited about any actual scientific discoveries. When Jurassic Park came out, I remember wishing there was some way to source original biological material from dinosaur fossils, but even if you had perfectly preserved mosquitoes in amber, the blood in them wouldn't really be blood anymore. More importantly, I know many scientists would be very excited if we could obtain original biological material, but that would not imply that the fossil was less than 10,000 years old, and COULD not imply that the UNIVERSE was less than 10,000 years. We KNOW better, and yes, we know that for certain. You want me to admit to absolutes? There you go. By definition, if something has been proved, it can't be made ambiguous again.

So Aron, here are my questions, repeating my first which I think you forgot to answer:

BE-Question #1, NEWTON THE CREATIONIST: AronRa, learning of Newton's belief that God created the world as revealed in Scripture about 4,000 years before Christ, and having read in my first post above Newton's words of commitment to divine origins and his principled rejection of naturalistic origins, I'm asking you to agree that you were wrong to devise a definition of a "creationist" to try and justify your claim that Newton was not a creationist, and so to agree that if you are going to list scientists by their claims on origins, that you will list Isaac Newton among the literal creationists. Agreed?

No. I already answered this question in my previous post, and my explanation was very clear. You really need to read for comprehension.

BE-Question #2, TRUSTWORTHY STATISTICS: Aron, since I was referring to the same study you were, which study affirmed my statement that a large percent of U.S. doctors reject strict Darwinism including 34% who prefer intelligent design, will you now agree to withdraw that particular criticism of yours against me?

No, because the cited affirmed only a minority of false-authorities. It also does not define what "Darwinism" is, nor does it explain the qualifier making it 'strict'. Let me help you with that. Darwinism is an explanation only of natural selection, which is further limited by the exclusion of genetics. To be 'Darwinism' implies that it is pre-mendelian. I corrected you on this point on the show. After arguing this subject for so many years, I would have thought you would have figured out these terms by now. Do you want to explain what you think 'strict' Darwinism is? Because I should expect you to show where the cited study clarified that point for each of these medical doctors that were polled. How did they know whether they were rejecting Darwinism specifically as opposed to biological evolution in general? And what were they told to contrast to the qualifier of being 'strict'?

Since I have also been debating this subject for a long time, I would guess that you are simply deliberately misrepresenting the foundation of modern biology as though it were only the speculations of a single amateur from the 19th century, that you evoked an 'ism' hoping to make it sound like a religious belief. That is one of the many lies of equivocation you keep repeating, like when you pretend there is such a thing as 'evolutionary dogma'. There isn't. Finally, I would guess that you probably imagine 'Darwinism' would be 'strict' if it is distinguished from theistic evolution, meaning that it does not involve any supernatural mysticism. I would advise you not to continue this behavior, if you want anyone believe you have any sincerity in you.

BE-Question #3, DENYING DINOSAUR SOFT TISSUE: Aron, will you agree that my presentation to you on the radio of the soft-tissue dinosaur finds was valid,

No, your presentation of them was definitely not valid!

and that your claim that I was wrong about this was a result of you being out-of-date with the latest science,

No, the fact that you were wrong about these things is your own fault alone.

and that therefore I was correct when I asserted that there have been multiple published findings of original dinosaur (and dinosaur era) biological tissue,

No. While I would like to see some of that turn out to be original biological material, and it would not help you if it were, the fact is that it has either not been confirmed or has already been refuted. Zero does not equate to a multiplicity.

and that you wrongly denied what now is widely-reported and peer-reviewed objective science on dinosaur tissue?

No, I don't know of anytime I have ever denied widely-reported and peer-reviewed objective science, but I will contest everything you've said instead.

I'm looking forward to getting to your other challenges Aron.

Don't look forward; look backward. You've been dodging them since this began, and you will continue to dodge them I'm sure. This discussion really can't get started until you stop ignoring the questions I have already had to repeat for you. Please have the courtesy to address those challenges without any more stalling or posturing.

Once again, I apologize to the readers of this debate. The time for Bob to bring his game would have been when we were live on his show. He didn't do it there, and he apparently can't do it here either. I had hoped the main event would be more fun than this, but at least I can say that the peanut gallery for this debate is the funniest thread I have ever seen in this forum, thanks to Bob's producer.

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true." - Friedrich Nietzsche. "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." - Mark Twain

I have spent the last two weeks using the desktop version of Mendeley (which I highly recommend for researchers) reviewing dozens of peer-reviewed papers to produce the following summary. All sides should find fascinating this chronological presentation of a war in science unfolding before our eyes. For a while at least, this listing here on League of Reason is likely to be the best catalogue publicly available of the current state of the science regarding extant dinosaur primary tissue.

3) the list of primary peer-reviewed dinosaur tissue articles with excerpts and photos

In support of his claim that primary dinosaur soft tissue has not been discovered, Aron keeps saying that he read Schweitzer's paper. Her paper? To support your claim Aron you'd have to read and cite not her many papers but the 2008 PLoS One paper by Kaye, et al. or the 2011 J. Vert. Paleontology abstracts reference to a Salzberg paper (which I reference below, though it hasn't been completed yet). These sources interpret the tissue as contamination from many organisms including from bacterial biofilm. There's a paleontological battle of the titans going on right now that's thrilling to watch.

I argue that the intense bias against anything that creationists can "jump all over" has misdirected the contrary authors and that their claims do not falsify the soft-tissue finds and the immunological and protein sequencing evidence. For two decades Schweitzer and her wide circle of associates have been publishing many confirming journal papers with the work expanding. PRIOR to the 2008 biofilm paper, the same scientists reporting the soft tissue had also identified the presence of bacterial biofilm and all researchers appear to be following Schweitzer, et al., in their previously published suggestion to make sure to identify any bacterial contamination. And SINCE 2008, the dinosaur tissue camp has published their conclusion that early bacterial infiltration into bone pores has helped preserve primary dinosaur soft tissue.

In his denial AronRa contradicts himself by claiming that the soft tissue has "been refuted" and that it only preserves in large bones in special deposition.

So which is it? Has its very existence been refuted? Or does it preserve only in special conditions? These claims of yours contradict.

Aron, you wrote that this phenomenon occurs only in "very large bones, properly buried under the right conditions." Before it was falsified, much had been made in the literature about the requirement of large bones and burial in fluvial sandstone deposits such as in Montana's Hell Creek Formation. However, journal papers have since disproven both of these factors.

Five years ago as quoted below, the literature described, "soft-tissue and cellular preservation"¦ from the Cretaceous"¦ spanning"¦ varied depositional environments." And addressing both of the presumed requirements the 2011 PLoS One paper Microspectroscopic Evidence of Cretaceous Bone Proteins on the Mosasaur that I linked to above reports in their abstract that:

"the preservation of primary soft tissues and biomolecules is not limited to large-sized bones buried in fluvial sandstone environments, but also occurs in relatively small-sized skeletal elements deposited in marine sediments."

THEN, THREE REASONS WHY I ACCEPT THE SOFT-TISSUE CLAIMS

Reason 1 - Rapid Stratification: According to geologists everywhere including in this Geology of the Grand Canyon report available from the U.S. National Park Service, the Grand Canyon is missing the entire Cenozoic and Mesozoic geologic eras (off the top) and more than 100 million years of strata are missing from the middle of the Paleozoic (the entire Ordovician and Silurian periods are not there). The dozens of enormous side canyons, that themselves could be major tourist attractions, do not have rivers, extant or the otherwise, to explain their formation. The side canyons have not rivers, extant or otherwise, that could have carved them, but they formed by the rapid drainage of groundwater into the 277-mile long Grand Canyon that itself formed in a regional flood in the days following the breach of a natural dam. In my dozen of trips to the canyon and rafting there in the Colorado River, you can't help but see the flat boundaries between strata which in many places lack evidence of erosion between the strata (even with, for example, rain drop impressions atop one layer). So the virtually worldwide depositional layers exposed in the Grand Canyon provide evidence that strata, including dinosaur-bearing strata globally, were deposited rapidly.

Reason 2 - Carbon 14 Everywhere: As we all intuitively know, there is a general scarcity, thankfully, of radioactivity around the world (as evidenced in this small example by this U.S. Geological Survey report documenting the minimal amounts of uranium and thorium in U.S. coal beds). But a tremendous amount of radioactive decay would have to be occurring all over the world to create by neutron capture all the carbon 14 that is found, ubiquitously, in coal, petrified wood, oil, limestone, graphite, natural gas, amber, marble, dinosaur fossils, and even in allegedly billion-year-old contamination-resistant diamonds. If the entire world were a big chunk of carbon 14, it would decay in less than a million years. Yet organisms can only contain relatively small amounts of 14C, counted almost by the individual atoms in today's AMS labs. And that 14C can exist only for thousands of years (not millions), and even if replenished by contamination, all that contamination would have to be very recent. Yet peer-reviewed papers are reporting abundant carbon 14 found even in soft-tissue dinosaur bones. Yes, it's easy to claim an avalanche of worldwide secondary assumptions to explain all the 14C everywhere that it's not expected. But we assert that physics and math falsify those efforts and that the simple Occam's razor interpretation is correct: carbon 14 is everywhere because it's all young.

Reason 3 - Wildly Unexpected Genomic Discoveries: The scientists sequencing entire genomes of various species are reporting significant and unexpected finds of similarities and differences with the human genome, for example, from kangaroos, worms, sponges, and the chimp Y chromosome. Consider then that the main papers opposing the dinosaur soft tissue are arguing (from 2008) that bacteria have the genes to produce collagen, and (a JVP abstract only from 2011) that the interiors of carefully processed dinosaur bones yielded DNA segments from bacteria, plants, fungi, and of chordates including DNA from a chicken. However as widely reported:

- Kangaroo Genome: The director of Australia's Kangaroo Genomics Centre, Jenny Graves, said that "There [are] great chunks of the human genome"¦ sitting right there in the kangaroo genome." And the 20,000 genes in the kangaroo (about 20,500 in humans) are "largely the same" as in people, and Graves adds, "a lot of them are in the same order."

- Roundworm Genome: From the U.S. Human Genome Program, "The C. elegans [a roundworm] genome is packaged into 6 chromosomes containing about 19,000 genes, several times the number originally predicted by classical genetics experiments. About 40% of identified genes match those of other organisms, including humans." (And speaking of worms, in Nature has just reported the new genetics study that claims that marine worms are more closely related to humans than are insects or mollusks.)

- Sponge Genome: Published in the peer-reviewed Nature paper, Sponge genome goes deep, sponges have "more than 18,000 individual genes." And the Great Barrier Reef sponge genome shows, according to an interview with the study's co-author, Scientists find sea sponges share human genes, "that sea sponges share almost 70 percent of human genes." (Sound familiar?) And according to a palaeobiologist at the Smithsonian, "The genome also includes analogues of genes that, in organisms with a neuromuscular system, code for muscle tissue and neurons." And Science Daily reports from the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., "Though we think of a sponge as a simple creature whose skeleton we take to the bathtub, it has a lot of the major biochemical and developmental pathways we associate with complex functions in humans and other more complex animals." Allegedly, this would have been millions of years before the appearance of most of the 35 major animal groupings (called phylum), as UC Berkley's Bob Sander's describes it: "Essentially all the genomic innovations that we deem necessary for intricate modern animal life have their origins much further back in time that anyone anticipated, predating the Cambrian explosion by tens if not hundreds of millions of years."

- Chimp Y Chromosome: Geneticists sequenced the chimpanzee's Y chromosome and expressed "shock" as team leader Dr. David Page said in the journal Nature, that the human and chimp Y chromosomes are "horrendously different from each other." Horrendously? Why not just, "different," like Mars and Saturn? Because our alleged closest ancestor, in what makes a male different from a female, has only 66% of the genes that men do in our Y, and the chimp's Y codes for only half the proteins that ours does, and he has 30% of the entire Y that cannot be aligned to ours, and man's Y has 30% that doesn't line up to the chimps. That's why it's described as a "shock" and "horrendous." The claim that we were nearly 99% similar to chimps doesn't hold up when looking at what makes us males. Evidently, science is now just passing the "epicycles" stage of genetic knowledge.

Aron, it appears that estimating evolutionary closeness or distance by comparing percentages and similarities of genes is superficial. And it appears equally like it is jumping to conclusions for Kaye and Salzberg to conclude, after finding DNA segments of plants, fungi, and chordates in carefully handled dinosaur bones, that somehow chicken DNA migrated into the fossil.

LoR Members, just because I'm a creationist please don't dismiss my predictions about genetics. History has shown that in 1998 I won the debate point on Junk DNA against Dr. Eugenie Scott, a leading anti-creationist at NCSE. Unlike the relatively few gene segments that code for the 20,500 human proteins, the evolutionary claim of the 1990s was that the rest of the genome had no function and so was widely called junk (by the way, despite thousands of in print statements, it's being increasingly denied that evolutionists ever thought the rest of the genome was mostly junk). As you can hear online in Eugenie's debate, I said that genetics was in its infancy, and that it was too early to determine that all those non-coding segments of DNA had no function. The discoveries since then suggest that as compared to the few gene regions, there are an estimated one million regulatory segments which are not junk. Dr. Scott strongly rejected my creationist prediction and made the extraordinary claim, which I immediately offered her to retract, that scientists currently knew everything they would ever need to know about genetics to conclusively state that all those regions were useless junk.

(Please see part B which follows this for the conclusion of my debate round 3 post.)

"The fact that DNA sequence can be obtained from fossil organisms has opened new windows of opportunity for research"¦ Recently, S. R. Woodward et al. sequenced DNA from"¦ bone fragments apparently from a dinosaur"¦ However, the likely source of those DNA sequences appears to be human contamination. [However] support has been presented for other findings of DNA surviving for millions of years (10)"¦"

Aron, that reference #10 includes an impressive list of peer-reviewed publications in the 1990s asserting the survival for millions of years of measurable quantities of original biological deoxyribonucleic acid:

- The Proceedings of the Nat'l Academy of Sciences- Medical Science Research- Science and- Two papers in Nature.

All these journals published reports claiming that recovered DNA segments have survived for millions of years (despite extensive previous evidence of its rapid deterioration). However, fast forward to the year 2012 and the matter of dinosaur DNA, and so far, while dinosaur amino acids, still-soft original biological structures, and proteins have been confirmed by repeated sequencing, repeatable immunological experiments, etc., the ongoing efforts to find dinosaur DNA have yet to result in any confirmed finds.

""¦analysis of extracts from the bone tissues revealed the presence of molecules with light absorbance maxima consistent with nucleic acids and peptides/proteins. Analyses of bone extracts for amino acid content yielded ratios similar to those found for modern ostrich and horse bone. "¦ bony tissue samples from the T. rex suggests the presence of collagen type I remnants. "¦ "¦ bony tissue samples from the T. rex suggests the presence of collagen type I remnants. Results indicate that the analyzed tissue contains numerous biomolecules. While some of the biomolecules are most likely contaminants, the probable presence of collagen type I suggests that some molecules of dinosaurian origin remain in these tissues."

"The field of molecular palaeobiology was initiated in 1954, when Abelson successfully recovered ancient amino acids from fish dating back from the Devonian period" [400 mya].

Aron, while you say that humans are apes and everything is everything (and dinosaurs are fish?), I however would not use this last reference as evidence of soft-tissue from dinosaurs. I include this reference as an example of the widespread interest (JAG no less) in paleobiology, and also to show that despite ongoing widespread disbelief among evolutionists and atheists, it's been over half-a-century since scientists have been recovering original biological material from specimens allegedly tens and hundreds of millions of years old.

"Exceptionally preserved sauropod eggshells discovered in Upper Cretaceous"¦ in"¦ Argentina, contain skeletal remains and soft tissues of embryonic Titanosaurid dinosaurs. "¦mineralization may also have been rapid enough to retain fragments of original biomolecules in these specimens. To investigate preservation of biomolecular compounds in these well-preserved sauropod dinosaur eggshells, we applied multiple analytical techniques. Results demonstrate organic compounds and antigenic structures similar to those found in extant eggshells."

Traces of protein have survived for more than 70 million years in dinosaur eggs from Argentina. They bear strong similarities to proteins from chicken eggs. "¦ The eggs were laid by massive long-necked plant-eaters called titanosaurs. Buried by floods, the eggs fossilised unusually fast, preserving the soft tissues and tiny bones within.

Aron, for you, PZ Myers, Talk Origins, and others here on LoR who deny (or doubt) the existence of original biological material, this paper explains that researchers injected rabbits with these apparent dinosaur egg proteins. The animals developed antibodies similar to those they produce in experiments with similar modern protein.

"The vessels and contents are similar in all respects to blood vessels recovered from extant ostrich bone"¦ we demonstrate the retention of pliable soft-tissue blood vessels with contents that are capable of being liberated from the bone matrix, while still retaining their flexibility, resilience, original hollow nature, and three-dimensionality. "¦we have indentified protein fragments in extracted [T. rex.] bone samples, some of which retain slight antigenicity." [referring to the ability to provoke antibodies in immunological tests]

""¦soft tissues could be preserved in the fossil record, not just by replacement"¦ but as intact structures retaining flexibility and resilience. "¦additional fossil material, including other tyrannosaurs [and] hadrosaurs"¦ indicates that this is not an isolated phenomenon. The challenge of trying to manipulate, process and analyze vessels and cellular structures millions of years old is not a minor one. "¦ We have tested a variety of methods for"¦ extracting soft tissue and cellular structures"¦ to characterize preservation at cellular and sub-cellular levels."

"Late Cretaceous avian bone tissues from Argentina demonstrate exceptional preservation"¦ to the microstructural and molecular levels. Bone tissues respond to collagenase digestion and histochemical stains. "¦we have applied atomic force microscopy to address the integrity and functionality of retained organic structures. "¦measurements not only support immunochemical evidence for collagen preservation for antibody recognition but also imply preservation of the whole molecular integrity. "¦ The conclusion that the fossil section is organic is further supported by ToFSIMS [ion mass spectroscopy] analysis (not show) and the collagenase digestion experiments"¦ Imaging ToFSIMS shows an abundance of organic fragments"¦"

And remembering that biomineralization is the process by which organisms produce minerals to harden tissue (such as an animal making calcium for bone), this same 2007 paper on dinosaurs pointed out that scientists had long considered the fossilization "of non-biomineralized tissues." But now scientists should try to:

""¦explain the detailed preservation of still-soft, transparent, hollow and flexible tissues and cells over geological time, given that natural processes such as decay and degradation"¦ and chemical and/or enzymatic degradation (Lindahl 1993; Riley & Collins 1994; Collins et al. 2000, 2002) act in concert to rapidly degrade both the molecules and the tissues they comprise."

The paper also describes the original biological material in "Sue," the largest and best preserved Tyrannosaurus rex ever found, now permanently exhibited in Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. From Sue:

"Small regions of soft tissue were recovered," and "Osteocytes with long filipodia and distinct, well-defined 'nuclei' were restricted to pliable regions of matrix"¦"

This paper also describes the discovery within the Triceratops horridus of:

"Hollow, transparent and flexible vessels [which] were slightly pigmented" and its "Osteocytes"¦ had pigmented elongate cell bodies, some with internal contents and short, stubby filipodia."

Of the various dinosaur soft tissue types, the paper says:

"As arguably the most labile and easily degraded of the structures we observed, the presence of soft vessels is enigmatic. They are neither biomineralized nor have any obvious inherent characteristics that would favour preservation"¦"

And of bacterial contamination and biofilms, in the year before the publication of the primary opposing theory, Schweitzer, et al., wrote:

"The possibility that microbes may have invaded bone and vascular channels after death, secreting extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) that subsequently mineralized, was also considered. If deposition of mineral upon microbial biofilm allowed retention of flexibility in one case, it is feasible to propose that the same process contributed to the preservation of the original vessel walls."

And back in 2007, the authors write that while they remain open to further pending analysis of the osteocytes, they "consider these cell-like structures to be remains of original cells."

Then a few months later the journal Science published a peer-reviewed paper from a team of scientists including from Harvard and the University of Chicago marking a significant development in the history of this breakthrough field. For this excerpt, remember that the word endogenous means originating within, of course, as opposed to an external contamination.

"We performed multiple analyses of Tyrannosaurus rex (specimen MOR 1125) fibrous cortical and medullary [pregnancy-related bone] tissues remaining after demineralization. The results indicate that collagen I, the main organic component of bone, has been preserved in low concentrations in these tissues. The findings were independently confirmed by mass spectrometry. We propose a possible chemical pathway that may contribute to this preservation." And the team considers the implications of the "presence of endogenous protein in dinosaur bone"¦"

""¦it has been hypothesized that original molecules will be either lost or altered to the point of nonrecognition over relatively short time spans (well under a million years) (1-7). However, the discovery of intact structures retaining original transparency, flexibility, and other characteristics in specimens dating at least to the Cretaceous (8, 9) [65+ mya] suggested that, under certain conditions, remnant organic constituents may persist across geological time." -Science 2007, Schweitzer, et al.

Aron, the standard explanation by atheists and evolutionists that I've seen, including here on LoR, is that the biofilm interpretation published in 2008 has "refuted" the soft-tissue claims. Apparently that's your explanation too. I can't be sure because rather than provide evidence for me and the readers you have simply stated that the soft tissue has been "refuted." And whereas I've been posting all along extensive evidence of my assertion, you've left us guessing as to how, when, where, by whom this has been "refuted." The 2008 biofilm paper is a worthwhile scientific endeavor: exploring whether bacteria could create these dinosaur artifacts. But on its primary goal it was given far too much credit because it virtually ignored the following positive evidence from this same 2007 paper (and from elsewhere):

"¦collagen [type] I has unique characteristics"¦ making validation of its presence relatively straightforward.

This finding suggests that the bone mineral is virtually unchanged from the living state and has undergone little if any alteration. "¦ the elasticity of dinosaur tissues was similar to that of demineralized extant bone.

"¦bone extracts showed reactivity to antibodies raised against chicken collagen"¦ We confirmed the antibody reactivity data by in situ immunohistochemistry"¦

Sandstones entombing the dinosaur, subjected to TOF-SIMS as a control, showed little or no evidence for these amino acids.

"¦ that molecular fragments of original proteins are preserved in the mineralized matrix of bony elements of MOR 1125 is supported by peptide sequences recovered from dinosaur extracts, some of which align uniquely with chicken collagen"¦ The amount of protein or protein-like components"¦ was ~0.62% for cortical bone and 1.3% for medullary bone.

Additionally, experiments have been conducted independently in at least three different labs and by numerous investigators, and the results strongly support the endogeneity [internal origin] of collagen-like protein molecules. -Science 2007, Schweitzer, et al.

Contrary to Evolutionary Expectations: The propaganda now likely to come (like denying the Junk DNA claim, and like denying that NASA feared deep moon dust) is that Darwinists will begin to deny ever having doubted the ability of soft tissue to survive for millions (and billions) of years. So, preemptively against the same likely development regarding dinosaur soft tissue, I'll quote these authors admitting in Science what already we are beginning to see some atheists denying:

The presence of original molecular components is not predicted for fossils older than a million years"¦

"The preservation of proteinaceous materials over millions of years has caused paleobiologists to reconsider current models of fossilization. "¦ Conventional wisdom held that, under normal circumstances, decomposition occurs so rapidly and completely that, after a relatively short period of time, no molecular fragments (let alone cells or tissues) would remain. However, the observation of these components in multiple specimens of geological age, supported by amino acid sequence data from collagen preserved in the skeletal elements of T. rex, provide evidence for molecular preservation over millions of years."

Aron and LoR, because actual dinosaur soft-tissue protein biological material was being studied, a paleontologist (Schweitzer) teamed up with an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of New Hampshire (now the visiting scientists, genetics, at the Harvard School of Public Health) to publish in the peer-reviewed ERP which reports "from the field of proteomics [proteins] to advance scientific understanding of the many varied roles protein expression plays in human health and disease."

Now to the popular anti-soft-tissue 2008 paper which examined fossils from 15 genera and found no original soft tissue but only bacterial biofilm contamination. In 2008 of course the authors were unaware of all later soft-tissue confirmations, but unreasonably they glossed over the previous published immunological and protein sequencing findings.

The paper does acknowledge something that FALSIFIES the LoR members understanding of what is being claimed in the many published papers. While AronRa claims, without offering evidence, that the soft-tissue finds have "been refuted," the LoR members posting in this debate's companion thread are somehow interpreting all these findings as not even claiming that original dinosaur biological tissue has been found. This PLoS One paper, which sought to reinterpret the still-soft elements as something other than endogenous dinosaur tissue, AT LEAST ADMITS what has been claimed by the published papers, that the previous claimed:

Aron, could you please tell the LoR members that what is being debated is the existence of extant dinosaur biological, primary soft tissue. LoR seems certain that's not even the subject of journal controversy. And the more they dig in, bolstered by your out-of-date claim, the further those rooting for you move from even knowing what is being debated, let alone the truth of it.

From the paper:

"The hollow [voids] of the tyrannosaur femur supported the general idea that an exceptionally well-preserved bone may act as a containment vessel for biomolecules. "¦ To test this concept, a perfectly preserved turtle phalange [finger bone]... was pressure fractured and directly examined...."

The authors found bacterial biofilm and other structures that visually looked similar superficially to the structures found in the soft tissue findings. And their infrared investigation suggested that their dinosaur fossils were more similar to biofilm than to modern collagen. The primary effect of their results was helpfully and simply to add increased emphasis on the effort to exclude bacterial contamination from studies of dinosaur tissue.

For example, in the biofilm paper:

...demineralized specimens... displayed small red spheres clustered in the tubular structures (Fig. 4A). Discovery of these spheres in an ammonite [extinct mollusk] suture [a rigid joint] indicated they had no relationship to iron derived from blood. "¦ The second structure category consisted of soft, pliable, branching tubules with morphology closely resembling blood vessels."

However Aron, the apparent biological heme from Jack Horner's T. rex was injected into lab rats and they produced antibodies for hemoglobin, something they would not do if the iron were not biological and only the "iron-oxygen spheres" reported in this biofilm paper. This is why Schweitzer was working with immunologists.

Further, for the bacteria to help preserve the endogenous tissue requires its presence contemporaneously or shortly after the animal's burial, which might be shown also because these species of bacteria (the unfinished 2011 JVP abstract paper might help here) would prefer to be feeding on the decaying animal carcass. And as we've offered Jack Horner a grant of $23,000 to carbon date either their Wankel T. rex or their pregnant (at the time of its death) B. rex, these authors did just that (as have others), and obtained the results that we expected. Of course, they interpreted the presence of modern carbon in a common way, the circularity of which is typically obvious only to biblical creationists:

"In order to determine if the mineralized biofilms were ancient in origin, a sample of material removed from the vascular canals was subjected to 14C dating. The results were 'greater than modern' indicating a modern origin for the material."

However, remember that 14C is found everywhere it shouldn't be. And finally, the authors claim that since the Journal of Biological Chemistry had recently reported the identification in a bacteria genome of collagen-related genetic code, therefore, finding collagen proteins in dinosaur bones is ambiguous:

Recent discoveries [Genome-based identification"¦ of collagen-related"¦ motifs in bacterial"¦ proteins] of collagen-like proteins in bacteria and viruses [17] add to the problem of unambiguous identification of vertebrate biomolecules."

Apparently, AronRa believes that this (and perhaps the Salzberg 2011 unfinished paper) has refuted all the soft-tissue finds, protein sequencing, immunological tests, etc., from specimens extracted from various dinosaurs (and all the other reported dinosaur-era soft-tissue finds). But a dozen institutions both before and after this 2008 paper, disagree and continue to publish their confirmations.

These authors report finding original biological material feathers in an Archaeopteryx fossil from the Solnhofen limestone, although only enough to make identification of the appropriate compounds at the appropriate parts of the animal's anatomy including skull, claws, feathers, feather shafts, postcranial skeleton, and teeth. They report:

""¦striking and previously unknown details about the chemical preservation of soft tissue, elemental distribution patterns most likely related to the organism's life processes, insights into the chemistry of soft tissue, elemental distribution to the organism's life processes"¦

Most striking is that, in addition to the bone material, the chemical remains of the rachises (shafts) from the flight feathers are now revealed: The P [phosphorus] distribution is clearly controlled by both bone as well as soft tissue remnant from the original organism. Although phosphatized muscle tissue has been re-ported from the Solnhofen (21), the phosphorus and sulfur levels responsible for the rachis images presented here do not require the addition of P or S from elsewhere.

"¦iron zoning in the feathers... is probably NOT an original feature of the organism. [However] the evidence strongly implies that the rachises [feather shafts] are at least in part the chemical remains of the original organism.

"¦the high zinc levels in the Archaeopteryx bone have been inherited from the original organism.

"¦phosphorous point levels measured from the [feather shafts] ... strongly supporting the inference that part of the feather chemistry is preserved.

Zinc apparently was present in appreciable concentrations in the original bone (as in many extant organ-isms) and has been well sequestered within the bone over 150 million years of burial.

Other work (31) thus supports our most striking result: that elevated Zn levels associated with the skull and other bones have persisted over geological time and most likely, along with phosphorous and sulfur, are remnants of the original bone chemistry.

Ca [calcium] removal from some parts of the Archaeopteryx is negligible"¦

Preservation of GROSS soft tissues is extremely rare, but recent studies have suggested that primary soft tissues and biomolecules are more commonly preserved within preserved bones than had been presumed.

Some of these claims have been challenged... suggesting that some of the structures are microbial artifacts, not primary soft tissues.

The identification of biomolecules in fossil vertebrate extracts from a specimen of Brachylophosaurus canadensis [Hadrosaur] has shown the interpretation of preserved organic remains as microbial biofilm to be highly unlikely.

This study experimentally examines the role of microbial biofilms in soft-tissue preservation"¦

The identification of biomolecules with vertebrate signatures[2,3] in the extracts from fossil vertebrates provides compelling evidence countering the argument that these structures are simply microbial biofilm [4].

both primary soft tissue and microbial biofilms are composed of organic carbon, control samples and biofilm samples possess a similar EDS signature that is unreliable for differentiation. However, primary soft-tissues in control samples are morphologically different from biofilm samples. Primary soft- tissues analyzed by SEM show red blood cells and vessels at relatively low magnifications (<100x) (Figure 6) whereas biofilms on bones shows smooth, undulating surfaces at similar magnifications"¦

Phosphatized soft-tissues in the basal ornithimimosaur [sic, bird-mimic ostrich-like dinosaurs], Pelecanimimus polydon, have also been described in the form of muscle and skin [25]. The results of this study strongly suggest that microorganisms play a role in the preservation of primary soft- tissues in vertebrate organisms, without extensive secondary mineralization. "¦ biofilms may directly enhance the preservation of vertebrate primary soft-tissues. ...exquisite preservation of pliable soft-tissues may be related to a microbial masonry process whereby the formation of microbial biofilms wall off internal surfaces of bones during early taphonomic stages.

The claim of the presence of primary soft-tissues in fossil vertebrates has been supported by the identification by mass spectroscopy of biomolecules in the form of collagen and [other] proteins...

A great paper, but the authors failed to report something that should be routine, the carbon 14 date of their specimens and the percentage of right and left-handedness of the amino acids.

""¦direct spectroscopic characterization of isolated fibrous bone tissues, a crucial test of hypotheses of biomolecular preservation over deep time, [previously] has not been performed. Here, we demonstrate that endogenous [originating from the mosasaur itself] proteinaceous [pertaining to protein, biological] molecules are retained in a humerus [arm bone] from a Late Cretaceous mosasaur (an extinct giant marine lizard). In situ immunofluorescence of demineralized bone extracts shows reactivity to antibodies raised against type I collagen, and amino acid analyses of soluble proteins extracted from the bone exhibit a composition indicative of structural proteins or their breakdown products. These data are corroborated by synchrotron radiation-based infrared microspectroscopic studies demonstrating that amino acid containing matter is located in bone matrix fibrils that express imprints of the characteristic 67 nm D-periodicity typical of collagen. Moreover, the fibrils differ significantly in spectral signature from those of potential modern bacterial contaminants, such as biofilms and collagen-like proteins. Thus, the preservation of primary soft tissues and biomolecules is not limited to large-sized bones buried in fluvial sandstone environments, but also occurs in relatively small-sized skeletal elements deposited in marine sediments.

...to facilitate comparisons with a relevant modern reference, bone tissue samples from an extant monitor lizard (LO 10298) were prepared in the same way as the mosasaur tissues.

"¦numerous free- floating, vessel-like structures [from the mosasaur] joined in a discrete network"¦ similar to those previously reported in dinosaurs [6,10]. Associated with the vessel-like forms were cell-like features"¦ and a fibrous substance that, in modern bone, would represent the organic phase of the extracellular matrix; i.e., the osteoid [organic bone material] (Figure 1G). The fibrous organization of the organic matter was demonstrated by optical and scanning electron microscopy (Figures 1A, B and H). Furthermore, application of a standard histochemical dye (Aniline blue) revealed that the fiber-like structures take up stain as does recent connective tissue (Figure 1L)"¦

Fiber-like forms with a similar typical axial periodicity were also found coiled obliquely around some canal walls (Figure 1K) and are, in modern animals, comprised primarily of mineralized fibrillar collagens (Figure 1J)"¦ The amino acid profiles we obtained have a composition potentially indicative of fibrous structural proteins"¦ such as collagen [19], suggesting that the proteinaceous molecules isolated from IRSNB 1624 [the mosasaur] may contain this protein"¦

"¦the amount of finite carbon was corresponding to 4.68%60.1 of modern 14C matter; Figure 4). Likewise, the amount of finite carbon was exceedingly small, corresponding to 4.68% +/- 0.1 of modern 14C activity (yielding an age of 24 600 BP), and most likely reflect bacterial activity near the outer surface of the bone (although no bacterial proteins or hopanoids were detected, one bacterial DNA sequence was amplified by PCR"¦)"

2011 - PLoS One: Dinosaur Peptides Suggest Mechanisms of Protein Survival by San Antonio, Schweitzer, [and six other authors including from Orthovita, Inc.; University of Pennsylvania; NCSU; North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences; Montana State University; the Illinois Institute of Technology; Harvard Medical School; University of Manchester; University of York; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology].

"Eleven collagen peptide sequences recovered from chemical extracts of dinosaur bones were mapped onto molecular models of the vertebrate collagen fibril derived from extant taxa. The dinosaur peptides localized to fibril regions protected by the close packing of collagen molecules"¦

Four peptides mapped to collagen regions crucial for cell-collagen interactions"¦ Dinosaur peptides were not represented in more exposed parts of the collagen fibril"¦

Thus functionally significant regions of collagen fibrils that are physically shielded within the fibril may be preferentially preserved in fossils. These results show empirically that structure-function relationships at the molecular level could contribute to selective preservation in fossilized vertebrate remains"¦

This non-random distribution supports the hypothesis that the peptides are produced by the extinct organisms"¦

Type I collagen peptides were extracted and sequenced from ~68 million years old fossils of Tyrannosaurus rex... despite multiple lines of evidence to support the presence of collagen, including in situ antibody binding, the endogeneity of MOR 1125 peptides was disputed, and the sequences instead were suggested to arise from either microbial invasion [19], extant collagens introduced in laboratory experiments [2], or even statistical artifact [3]. Collagen peptide sequences were subsequently derived from a second dinosaur, Brachylophosauraus canadensis (MOR 2598) [9], and included many of the earlier lines of supporting evidence as well as independent replication of data in multiple labs. Surprisingly, advances in collagen biology also support the authenticity of the fossil peptides. The molecular structure of collagen favors preservation.

"The idea that endogenous soft tissues are preserved in Mesozoic fossil bone remains contentious after 6 years of research. Here, full characterization of DNA is reported using 'Metagenomics' techniques from a section of Brachylophosaurus canadensis [hadrosaur] fossil, JRF 56, from the Judith river formation near Malta, Montana. Soft tissue structures similar to those reported as dinosaurian blood vessels and bone cells are observed"¦

Previous studies have focused on long-lasting proteins since it is generally accepted that DNA can not survive such time scales. Here metagenomics data is presented that identifies ALL the DNA in the sample giving proportionate rank of endogenous molecular species.

The sample was processed to isolate organic remnants from the intravascular cavities of the fossil's cortical bone, excluding possible contamination from sediments on the bone surface. DNA from various species of bacteria, plants, fungi, and chordates was detected in the bone and therefore longer lasting proteins from these species can be expected. Critically, avian molecules identified as modern bird DNA were found in the organic isolates [includingchicken apparently; and an allegation, reasonably leveled since Schweitzer used ostrich material as a control, that she contaminated her specimen with ostrich DNA and hemoglobin.].

Bacteria DNA provides support for the production of biofilms within the fossil"¦

The presence of modern bird and other chordate DNA provide a large analytical obstacle to identifying possible endogenous [molecules.

Aron, I reject this claim that dinosaur soft-tissue has not been identified. You attribute my conclusion to my creation bias, but I would offer as evidence the reasons presented above in peer-reviewed publications in PNAS, Science, PLoS One, Expert Reviews of Proteomics, Journal of Applied Genetics, Langmuir: A Journal of the American Chemical Society, the Proceedings of the Royal Society, and below, in the journal Nature. I also expect that the soft-tissue dinosaur claims will be fully vindicated because I believe what Jesus Christ said that, "from the beginning of the creation, God 'made them male and female.'" And I doubt also anti-dinosoaur-tissue claims because as you'll recall from above, the left-handedness of dinosaur-era amino acids, the 14C everywhere it wasn't expected, the evidence of rapid stratification, the unexpected genome discoveries, for example, from kangaroos, worms, the chimp Y chromosome, and sponges, which findings make the Salzberg and Kaye assessments here questionable.

Even this paper on something as delicate as Archaeopteryx feathers disproves the somewhat bizarre claim of various evolutionists here on LoR (and of others we've encountered) that no actual original biological material has even been claimed. In the following excerpts, of course a biomarker is an indicator of a biological state. And organocopper is a compound in organic chemistry. And within organic chemistry is the specialty of biomolecular chemistry that looks for biomarkers which are indicators of biological processes. Archaeopteryx had black melanin in its feathers (darker at the tips) as determined by the distribution and the dimensions of its melanosomes which were measured at only a quarter of a millionth of a meter (250 nanometers) wide.

"We interpret the feather's dark trace to be a melanic organosulphur residue, based on the following.

First, we detected no manganese among nine point analyses throughout the feather, indicating that preservation was not due to precipitation of the inorganic mineral, manganese dioxide (MnO2), as has been suggested"¦

Second, a potential organocopper biomarker for melanin was previously detected in this specimen; this biomarker has also been correlated with the presence of melanosomes in three fossil bird taxa. We hypothesize that melanosome structures fossilize simply by virtue of being solid aggregations of melanins"¦ resistant to degradation.

Third, the dark trace is associated with sulphur, which may have derived from the sulphur-rich feather keratin and crosslinked with the melanin; this is consistent with the sulphurization mechanism responsible for high-fidelity organic preservation in the fossil record."

Reconsideration Due for Other Claims of Soft Tissue: With all of the above hard science being published toward confirming extant dinosaur soft tissue, now, other claims that were mostly winked at should be given a new look, including finds with alleged dates of:

AronRa, instead of checking the journal references I mentioned to you on air, or clicking on the links to the peer-reviewed papers I provided in Round Two above, out of your evolutionist bias you dismissively mocked my assertion that there have been many peer-reviewed publications affirming dinosaur soft tissue (as in our 1.5 minute audio segment).

You dismissed my citing of peer-reviewed journal reports by saying about Mary Schweitzer that you talked to "one of the guys on her team, and" that "he told me that Schweitzer and Horner both liked to stir up controversy"¦" And that you "read her paper." Her paper?

Okay.

Australopithicus: Representing LoR, please consider this request. I would like an apology from you on behalf of LoR and the atheists and evolutionists on these boards for their arbitrary behavior, giving Aron a pass for his "trust me" claim that the soft-tissue has "been refuted," while for no reason being utterly dismissive toward my references to journal papers. (I've only skimmed the other threads, but it seems that you all have treated Will Duffy, "YesYouNeedJesus," in the peanut gallery debate comment thread with this same bad behavior and arbitrary criticism.) It has been completely surreal Australopithicus that your site regulars have largely united behind the extremely absurd claim that "Enyart" et al., "do not even know what fossilisation means," for, allegedly from your evolutionist members, the reports above DO NOT EVEN CLAIM that soft biological tissue has been discovered. No? Well then, why all the controversy for 20 years? Could you apologize Australopithicus also for that extremely bad behavior?

And Aron, I'm not asking you here for your opinion as to whether the dinosaur tissue claims will be vindicated, or overturned. Instead, as with the broad brush criticism you've made against leading creationists that we use out-of-date scientific research, which I provided contrary evidence for on air by citing the many current scientific references in a single publication of Answers in Genesis,

BE-Question #4, We're You Out of Date AronRa: I'm asking Aron if you can admit that you were the one who was out-of-date with your dismissive chuckle indicating that yet another creationist didn't know what he was talking, as evidenced when you said, "I've read Schweitzer's paper. I suggest you review it." Her paper? Singular? Wouldn't you have to cite not Schweitzer but papers by other authors to defend your claim? I replied on air Aron that "you need to read the last five years worth of refereed scientific journals including from everywhere... in Nature, Science, PLoS -- Public Library of Science"¦" before you could come to a scientifically informed conclusion on dinosaur soft tissue. Agreed?

I need to remind Bob that this thread is for debating AronRa, not for making demands on the members of this forum. I will address your request in the discussion thread however from this point on this thread will be on topic, without spurious digressions.

If you have a problem with anything outside of this debate you take it up outside of this debate.

BobEnyart wrote:Aron, while you say that humans are apes and everything is everything (and dinosaurs are fish?)

That depends on how you define 'fish'. As I said in my Darwin Day speech in Florida last month, "the word, 'fish' also does not have a consistent definition of traits applicable to everything universally accepted as a fish. There are some that are warm-blooded, some that have legs instead of fins, or that don't have scales, or lack fins on their tails, and there are some things that are very much like fish, but aren't fish, yet they still have gills. The only way that 'fish' can be taxonomically consistent is if it means the same thing as 'chordate'." I don't say that 'everything is everything', but I do say that dinosaurs are chordates.

BE-Question #4, We're You Out of Date AronRa: I'm asking Aron if you can admit that you were the one who was out-of-date with your dismissive chuckle indicating that yet another creationist didn't know what he was talking, as evidenced when you said, "I've read Schweitzer's paper. I suggest you review it." Her paper? Singular? Wouldn't you have to cite not Schweitzer but papers by other authors to defend your claim?

No; that would have helped, but it wasn't necessary. As is typical of creationists, you misunderstood what your own citations said, and what they mean. You also misunderstood what I said about them -due to your previously noted problem with reading comprehension. I never said they were the result of contamination for example. You accused me of saying that, but I didn't.

As I told you before, the first I had ever heard of dinosaur soft-tissues was the same type news story you cited, saying that the main protein component of bone had been found, "providing molecular support for the hypothesis that modern birds are descended from dinosaurs". Actually the first one I saw was a different news story from a couple years earlier, which said "The vessels and contents are similar in all respects to blood vessels recovered from extant ostrich bone,". It had not yet been discovered that these proteins were a 'perfect match' with the ostrich proteins Schweitzer used in her analysis. So at that time, I thought they were genuine rather than contaminants. However, rather than acknowledge the obvious evolutionary implication, creationists immediately chimed in -as if these findings could support their young earth nonsense. So I looked up Schweitzer's paper for the proper explanation. I saw her earlier submissions from the 1990s, talking about her hope for processes of acquiring DNA from unusually well-insulated osteocytes. But I didn't read those. I only read her 2005 article which reportedly supported the creationists' claims. Not surprisingly, it didn't, and I didn't have to read the refutation to know that. Somehow creationists had turned "seven fragmentary chains of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins" into full-blown DNA ready for cloning.

Like I told you two posts ago- I had already accepted the possibility of finding bone proteins long before I ever heard of you, and if anything original or 'primary' has been confirmed, that would be it so far. When I saw that Schweitzer had written articles about recovering DNA, I thought she already had. Subsequent articles showed that she had not, at least not yet. I remain completely open. But when creationists claimed 'original biological material', they weren't talking about microscopic collagen residues softening after demineralization; they meant having actual unfossilized and undeteriorated blood cells and other original biological tissues "looking like they came from a butcher shop". While on your show, I made sure that is what you meant too. You said they had confirmed actual blood cells with no chemical deterioration.

The articles you cited described "recovery of what appear to be cells, blood vessels and tissues", meaning that they had not been confirmed. Understand that calling "structures morphologically reminiscent of vertebrate red blood cells" does not mean they are red blood cells. That's what they say when they have not been confirmed. Tissues are reported as 'preserved', because that's what fossilization does, but it doesn't mean preserving the original chemical composition. In fact, your citations say that these were fossilized at least to the point of having to be demineralized. One of your citations even says the collagen may be 'preserved' only as breakdown compounds per oxidative deamination, meaning that it was both fossilized and decomposed.

Your most compelling argument, seriously, was when you said that the heme from Horner's T-rex was used to immunize lab rats, generating antibodies. However even that study identified the source as ancient heme and hemoglobin break-down products, compounds derived from blood, but that were not actually blood anymore. So all you proved after two weeks of effort was what I had already told you three weeks ago.

Aron, you wrote that this phenomenon occurs only in "very large bones, properly buried under the right conditions."

No, I said that was my impression of the video where Schweitzer and Horner said that was their hypothesis regarding the T-rex and the hadrosaur. Your own citation offers an alternate explanation for the insulation of the Mosasaur fossil:

"For osteoid proteins, these conditions probably include protection from biodegradation by entombment in the highly resistant hydroxyapatite crystals of bone (Figure 1M), which in IRSNB 1624 may have been facilitated by the small diameter (20-30 nm) of the fibrils (resulting in a high mineral-to-extrafibrillar ratio). Moreover, high levels of phosphate and carbonate in the Ciply Phosphatic Chalk might have minimized dissolution and re-precipitation of the bone mineral. This limited the exposure of the protein molecules to microorganisms, thus retarding the extent of microbial degradation. Also, because microorganisms can only infiltrate bones via cracks or natural cavities, early intravascular mineralizations may have blocked off internal surfaces (Figure 4), thereby denying bacteria access to organic material in the bone matrix."

You said these were all original biological material, implying that they had not been fossilized at all, that they retained their original chemical composition, and were perhaps even still edible, but none of that appears to be correct in any of the instances you listed. Specifically referring to your comments on the archaeopteryx, where you insisted that feather barbs were not morphological impressions, I'll remind you what I told you before; there are traces of original chemicals, especially hardier elements like metals and so on. Zinc and even Calcium are metals. So is iron, the primary componant in heme. You also said that melanosomes were retained as original soft parts, but your own citation describe them being preserved as "phosphatizedremains or organic [melanic organosulphur] residues". This was one of your most recently-published citations, and yet it goes on to say, "whether multimillion-year-old fossils harbor original organic components remains controversial, and, if they do, a positive identification of these biomolecules is required." We're still waiting for that. The conclusion of this paper was that there may well be original collagen or it's degradation products sealed securely in silicate, but still no confirmation of that, or any of the other things you claimed either.

I didn't think I needed to show evidence that your assertions weren't supported,since they were your own citations. And I didn't think I needed to document how they had been refuted, since that was explained in the peanut gallery of this debate,which you already said you have seen. And I remind you that if actual original unfossilized and undecomposed biological materials ever are confirmed, that will not help you, because we have a great many conclusive ways of proving that the earth is billions of years old and that the universe is billions of years older than that. We know for certain that the world-wide flood never happened, and neither did the tower of Babel, or the magic fruit trees in the sacred garden. These are either legends based on exaggurations of real events, or they are adaptations of the fables of elder polytheism -or both! There is just no ambiguity about that anymore.

"The truth is that virtually every modern archeologist who has investigated the story of the Exodus, with very few exceptions, agrees that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all."-Senior Rabbi David Wolpe, Passover sermon 2001 Sanai temple, Los Angeles,

When I said that 'I would like to see some of these turn out to be original biological material', you somehow warped that into an "intense bias" on my part, as if I was determined to deny it even if you proved your point. No Bob, that's your strategy, not mine! I read each of these links open to the idea that you might make your case with any one of them. It's not my fault that you didn't.

I am no stranger to scientific controversies. I have many times contested other scientists on matters of cladistics. Remember I'm the guy who says that it turns out we DID come from monkeys, and that we're still monkeys right now. This came as a result of my losing a highly-confrontational debate with an ornithological systematist from the Arizona Tree of Life project. He forced me to change my mind, and I have since changed the minds of at least a few scientists in relevant fields.

Scientists are permitted and even encouraged to change thier minds in light of new evidence. But creationists are forbidden to change their minds, and must defend their faith even after it has been proven wrong. As I already explained multiple times both in these threads and on your show, every creationist organization posts a 'statement of faith' wherein they assert the absolute authority of their assumed conclusions, and where they admit their intent to automatically and thoughtlessly reject,without consideration- any and all evidence that may ever arise,should it contest their a-priori assumptions. "By definition, no apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record."--Answersingenesis.org

"verbal inspiration guarantees that these writings, as originally and miraculously given, are infallible and completely authoritative on all matters with which they deal, free from error of any sort, scientific [sic] and historical as well as moral and theological."--Institute for Creation Research

"...the autographs of the 66 canonical books of the Bible are objectively inspired, infallible and the inerrant Word of God in all of their parts and in all matters of which they speak (history, theology, science, etc.)."--'Creation Moments.com

"The Bible is the divinely inspired written Word of God. Because it is inspired throughout, it is completely free from error--scientifically, historically, theologically, and morally. Thus it is the absolute authority in all matters of truth, faith, and conduct. The final guide to the interpretation of the Bible is the Bible itself. God's world must always agree with God's Word, because the Creator of the one is the Author of the other. Thus, where physical evidences from the creation may be used to confirm the Bible, these evidences must never be used to correct or interpret the Bible. The written Word must take priority in the event of any apparent conflict."--Greater Houston Creation Association

"Revealed truth: That which is revealed in Scripture, whether or not man has scientifically proved it. If it is in the Bible, it is already true without requiring additional proof. ...Fallacy: that which contradicts God's revealed truth, no matter how scientific, how commonly believed, or how apparently workable or logical it may seem."--Bob Jones University, Biology Student Text (3rd ed.- 2 vol.)

"Any so-called "truth" in conflict with God's Truth is no truth at all; it is a lie, a manifestation of the one great Lie that tells us the God of the Bible is not the one God and King over all. The war between the Truth and "truths" is really the war between Truth and the Lie. But the Lie doesn't come to us openly announcing, "I'm false, I'm deceptive." Itcomes to us pretending it is true."[Apply Occam's razor to that.]--Campus Crusade for Christ

No scientific institution would tolerate such dishonesty, and yours is deliberate! Every creationist organization proclaims their bias as though it were something to be proud of, and that is not an accidental coincidence. Scientific methodology however seeks to minimize or eliminate bias. These lies of equivocation will not work. It is the fallacy of false balance. Your position and mine are not in any way comparable or equivalent choices. We have nothing in common. I don't have faith and you don't have evidence. Yours is an openly admitted and brazenly publicized conspiracy to conceal or ignore the truth. Mine is the honest investigation, and mine is the one that can prove when it gets things right. Stop trying to project your own faults onto those who will not share them. I am not biased; you are.

I replied on air Aron that "you need to read the last five years worth of refereed scientific journals including from everywhere... in Nature, Science, PLoS -- Public Library of Science"¦" before you could come to a scientifically informed conclusion on dinosaur soft tissue. Agreed?

Again, no. While one obviously should read relevant peer-reviewed studies, -as I have- it is not necessary to read them from EVERYWHERE before one can even form an opinion. I would suggest however that you would be better off if you read fewer papers, and don't just run through them to glean for key words or talking points; read for comprehension instead. Try to understand what you're talking about before you waste this much time and effort barking up the wrong tree, trying to force me to admit to something I already told you I was aware of. If you understood the things you read, you wouldn't have posted the reply that you did. Neither would you have repeated all the nonsense that you think supports that,which of course it doesn't, none of it.

This debate was supposed to be over the mistakes you made while I was on your show, yet you still haven't conceded or even acknowledged any of those many errors, and you just keep introducing new gaffs. For example, your comments about the Grand Canyon: There is no indication of rapid stratification, nor is that even possible given these conditions. Side canyons are carved by rainfall erosion triggering landslides and so on. There ARE obvious erosional unconformities at some locations in the Canyon, and I'll be happy to show geologic charts, pictures, and full explanations at another time. The same goes for your nonsense about Carbon14 and what you still don't understand about phylogentics -regarding roundworms and kangaroos. But as these are new errors that were not brought up on your show, then they are outside the scope of our debate. I will not be side-tracked by them, especially when you're now repeating errors I have already corrected in my opening thread to you. Obviously you never bothered to read that, so I'll just have to repeat those points here.

Since you brought up the sponge genome and the chimpanzee Y-chromosome again, ignoring what I already told you about them, let me remind you: On your show, you said:

The Y-Chromosome of chimpanzees is far away from human beings, from men, as the sponge genome is from human beings. Right? In the great barrier reef, they've now sequenced the lowly sponge, and and the headlines in the science journals are that the sponge has 70% similarity with the human genome.

I haven't found any journals which linked the two unrelated studies you've somehow gotten confused here.

First we'll deal with the genome of the sponge.

On your show, you said "sponges were 70% human"; not 'similar to human', not 'sharing the same type genes as humans', you said they were 70% human. That's not right. We can't even say their genes are human. That would imply that 70% of the genes found in sponges are otherwise unique to our species, when really those genes are common to all animals, including us. "The new study shows that, while the sponge genome contains most of the gene families found in humans, the number of genes in each family has changed significantly over the past 600 million years. By analyzing which gene families were enriched or depleted in different groups of animals, the authors identified groups of gene functions that are associated with morphological complexity."ScienceDaily

"This incredibly old ancestor possessed the same core building blocks for multicellular form and function that still sits at the heart of all living animals, including humans. It now appears that the evolution of these genes not only allowed the first animals to colonize the ancient oceans, but underpinned the evolution of the full biodiversity of animals we see today."-Bernie Degnan, a professor of biology at the University of Queensland, Australia

"According to Degnan, essentially all the genomic innovations that we deem necessary for intricate modern animal life have their origins much further back in time that anyone anticipated, predating the Cambrian explosion by tens if not hundreds of millions of years."-ScienceDaily

As I said on your show, I was fascinated by the 'Shape of Life' project which further confirmed evolution by finding a common orthologue of all animalia within the genome of Porifera, sponges, the oldest animals on earth. Essentially they are the template that all other animals are made from, so of course a substantial number of their genes would be common among all other animals too. As we are uneshewably animals also, we should expect to share at least basic genetics with them. The same goes Trychoplax placozoans, a karyotype of the earliest and most primitive of all animals, possibly even basal to sponges. Not surprisingly, they share 80% of their genes with us too.

"Trichoplax shares over 80 percent of its genes with humans. We are exited to find that Trichoplax contains shared pathways and defined regulatory sequences that link these most primitive ancestors to higher animal species. The Trichoplax genome will serve as a type of "Rosetta Stone" for understanding the origins of animal-specific pathways."-Stephen Dellaporta, professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale.

"Even though sponges don't have specialized cell types like neurons or muscles, they do have many of the genes that operate in those cell types in humans or fruit flies, though the function of these genes in sponges is still unclear."-Dr.Mansi Srivastava, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

"That was when the surprise hit, "We found a lot of genes to make a nervous system present in the sponge. We found this mysterious unknown structure in the sponge, and it is clear that evolution was able to take this entire structure, and, with small modifications, direct its use toward a new function. Evolution can take these 'off the shelf' components and put them together in new and interesting ways."-Prof. Kenneth Kosik M.D., co-director of UCSB's Neuroscience Research Institute

"The authors also identified in the sponge many of the same genes that characterize all other animals: genes involved not only in cell division and growth, but also in programmed cell death; the adhesion of cells to other tissue and to one another, signaling pathways during development, recognition of self and non-self; and genes leading to the formation of different cell types.Significantly, many of the genes that sponges share with humans may play a role in the development of cancer."NaturalNews

"Once there is a transition from single cell to multicellular organisms, conflict is set up between the different cells of the multicellular organism. It is in an individual cell's best interest to keep replicating, and this actually is what cancer is -- the uncontrolled replication of cells in the body. So in the history of animals, we can see this link with cancer, because the genes that are involved in the transition to multiple cells during evolution are also known to be linked to cancer."-Todd Oakley, Prof. Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, U.C. Santa Barbara

Humans and other vertebrates have since developed their own genes not found in invertebrates. So of course sponges have a different number of genes, and they won't operate the same way as they've been adapted to do in higher animals.

The chimpanzee genome is 30% different in the Y chromosome, "¦'horrendously different from the human Y-chromosome. "¦We are 30% different from supposedly our closest living relatives."

You should understand that sharing 70% of a gene set does not mean the same thing as having a 70% identical codon sequence, the way our genome matches that of chimpanzees and other higher animals.

"Genes only make up about 3% of our genome. Yes, you read that correctly. The rest of our genome is called non-coding or junk DNA. Despite the fact that there is so much junk, we still share 95-98% of our DNA with a chimp. And 80% with a mouse. This means that we share lots of genes and a ton of junk DNA." "-geneticist, Carrie Metzinger B.Sc., Bergmann Lab, Stamford University

"Preliminary sequence comparisons indicate that chimp DNA is 98.7% identical with human DNA. If just the gene sequences encoding proteins are considered, the similarity increases to 99.2%."-Dr. George B. Johnson, Biology Professor at Washington U. St. Louis, Missouri

So the first mistake you made here was assuming that a 70% similar gene set in sponges equates to a 70% identical codon sequence. Your second mistake was thinking that a 30% difference in the Y-chromosome somehow equates to a 30% difference in the entire genome. You simply deducted your 30% from 100 to conclude that chimpanzees were 70% similar to humans just like you thought sponges were. Wow.

Did you think that men were made entirely of nothing but Y-chromosomes? And that women were made entirely of X-chromosomes? You do understand that men have both of these, right?

Dr. Francis Collins, -director of the human genome project- obviously doesn't know as much about genetics as a creationist talk radio host citing Wikipedia, because Collins said that humans and chimps share 98.4% of their DNA. His international research consortium showed that directly comparable sequence between the two complete genomes is almost 99 percent identical, and that when DNA insertions and deletions are taken into account, humans and chimps still share 96% of their sequence. The first comprehensive comparison of the genetic blueprints of humans and chimpanzees shows our closest living relatives share perfect identity with 96% of our DNA sequence.

Even if we forget all about orthologous genomic sequencing for the moment. Given that there is a wide range of human-chimpanzee nucleotide divergence across the autosomal genome, and very low divergence in the X chromosome, if we say that the X-chromosome matches Collin's estimate, and the Y-chromosome is as you misunderstand it, then given that they count as an inseparable pair, you would not have only a 70% similarity; you would have (98.4 + 70) / 2 = 84.2%.

Of course you're forgetting that the sex-determining chromosomes account for only one pair out of 23, and that your divergent Y-chromosome is now outnumbered 45:1. That already more than accounts for the 'horrendous difference' you want people to think there is, but it gets even worse, because the Y-chromosome is disappearing. It is generally diminished in all mammals, not just humans and chimps. It has been reduced to 1/6 the size of its counterpart and has only 1/12 the number of genes. How much do you think your Y-chromosomal variance matters now?

Did you really not know any of this, -I mean none of it- before you broadcast these embarrassing blunders to thousands of listeners? How often do you do these shows?

This of course is just a detail from a much longer list which is summarized in my 1st post in this thread. You were expected to respond to that by listing whatever points you still think you can defend, and anything not included in that list would be taken as concession. That was a month-and-a-half ago, and you're still ducking, dodging, posturing, and smoke-screening the inevitable.

Once you get past this point, then we can get into phylogeny,where I am betting that I can prove evolution even to your satisfaction. Once you learn what the phylogeny challenge is, then you'll figure out why creationists won't answer it.

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true." - Friedrich Nietzsche. "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." - Mark Twain

I want to remind everyone -including Bob Enyart- where I think this debate is supposed to go. During our live interview, I told Bob that two guys talking on the radio can both claim evidence by citing facts and discoveries and such that cannot be verified on the fly. So the challenge was to come here and see how accurate our arguments actually were. I'll put each of the contested points [further summarized from my first post in this thread] in quote brackets so that they will be easier to distinguish and address.

1. In part one of our discussion, Bob tried to claim credibility for creationism within the scientific community by citing several pre-Darwinian scientists as creationists. I myself have described such people (like Carl Linne for example) as being 'essentially' creationist,in that they believed in Biblical fables before anyone knew any better. However not having any scientific alternative does not put pioneer scientists in the same class as modern creationists who oppose science altogether, seeking to undermine understanding according to a prior commitment to promote or defend a belief in magic instead. Bob added that he considered each of these men to have rejected 'naturalism'. Few -if any- of the scientists in his list meet that criteria.

For example, Francis Bacon invented scientific methodology, so he obviously didn't reject it. He also argued that matters of faith and natural science should be kept separate. Copernicus and Galileo were both famously charged with heresy when they challenged the church's authority regarding geocentricity.

The first criteria of creationism is that one reject evolutionary principles. But Georges Cuvier,father of paleontology- upset contemporary clergy by recognizing the geologic column (which Bob rejects) and its indication that whole species have gone extinct before our time, (which Bob also rejects). Louis Pasteur reportedly accepted evolution, albeit without Darwinian mechanisms, and he disproved the Lutheran belief that diseases were caused by demons. Gregor Mendel actually supported Darwinian evolution. In fact Mendel's contribution brought about the modern Mendelo-Darwinian synthesis. Bob knew this and even admitted it on the air, yet now he contradicts himself by saying that Mendel rejected evolution?! Bullshit, Bob! Put this in your errata.

Most amusingly Bob tried to cite the laws of thermodynamics as being opposed to, or a challenge for evolution, and he also lists Lord Kelvin on his side. However Kelvin invented those laws, and yet he said that evolution was "not unscientific". So obviously those laws do not present the challenge that Bob thought they should. Kelvin also disproved young earth creationism,with thermodynamics! What was the minimum age Kelvin said that the world had to be, Bob?

2. As we've just seen, Bob also claimed that 'original biological material' had been found in a handful of Cretaceous fossils. Left at that, the claim is ambiguous and arguable. However Bob specified that these discoveries confirmed original blood and other tissues that had not decomposed, and this is not the case. All that has been confirmed relating to the blood and feathers Bob specifically mentioned were that both had been decomposed and/or were preserved only as residue. Put this in your errata.

Part one of our discussion ended with a challenge to Bob regarding his own rejection of necessarily naturalist methodology. Name one time in the history of science when supernatural explanations ever proved to be correct, or actually improved our understanding of anything, rather than impeding or retarding all progress, as I believe has always been the case.

Part two explained the inequity of our two positions, and ended with me repeating a previous challenge which he failed to answer. Ignoring for a moment the thousands of creationist arguments which have all been proven wrong as many times, yet are still being presented on YEC websites around the world, can you show me one verifiably accurate argument, positively indicative of miraculous creation over biological evolution?

In part three, I provided exactly that on behalf of evolution. While we were on the air, Bob agreed that it is a fact that evolution happens; that biodiversity and complexity do increase, that both occur naturally according to the laws of population genetics amid environmental dynamics.

Bob agreed that it is a fact that alleles vary with increasing distinction in reproductive populations, and that these are accelerated in genetically isolated groups.

Bob agreed that it is a fact that natural selection, sexual selection, and genetic drift have all been proven to have predictable effect in guiding this variance both in scientific literature and in practical application.

Bob agreed that it is a fact that significant beneficial mutations do occur and are inherited by descendant groups, and that several independent sets of biological markers do exist which trace these lineages backwards over myriad generations.

Bob does not accept the fact that birds are a subset of dinosaurs, in the same way that ducks are a subset of birds, and that humans are a subset of apes in exactly the same way that lions are a subset of cats, but as I said, it is easy enough to prove, and I'll be happy to do that to his satisfaction here in this forum.

He didn't let me get to the rest of these, and ignored where I posted them previously, but we'll need him to agree or disagree with each of the facts below before I can proceed.

It is a fact that the collective genome of all animals has been traced to its most basal form through reverse-sequencing, and that those forms are also indicated by comparative morphology, physiology, and embryological development, as well as through chronologically correct placement of successive stages revealed in the geologic column.

It is a fact that every animal on earth has obvious relatives either living nearby or evident in the fossil record, and that the fossil record holds hundreds of clearly transitional species even according to the strictest definition of that term.

It is a fact that both microevolution and macroevolution have been directly-observed and documented dozens of times, both in the lab and in naturally-controlled conditions in the field, and that these instances have all withstood critical analysis in peer-review.

It is also a fact that evolution is the only explanation of biodiversity with either evidentiary support or measurable validity, and that no would-be alternate notion has ever met even one of the criteria required of a scientific theory.

I also explained that positive claims require positive evidence, and that assertions not supported by evidence may be dismissed without evidence -as they do not yet merit serious consideration. I explained that it is impossible to prove a negative claim, but that one also cannot have a sum or product of an equation when there is no available data to compute. Then I showed how AndromedasWake refuted Bob's claim of a geocentric universe. I also showed how Bob misrepresented Ann Gibbons, who did NOT say that Mitochondrial Eve was 6,000 years old "according to documented mutation rates". I also challenged Bob to explain why he refuses to accept any of the data which all consistently shows an African origin for all humanity.

3. Part three ended with Bob's assertion that I could either not present any precursors for dinosaurs or could not cite any scientists who agreed with whatever I might suggest. I answered that challenge with a succession of fossil precursors endorsed by an international team of paleontologists. Put this in your errata.

4.In part four, Bob claimed an alternative model to Big Bang cosmology -which does not exist, and he said it was concordant with the creationists' model of the universe -which also does not exist. I defended myself against Bob's accusation of having misrepresented Laurence Krauss by showing where Krauss also refuted Bob's claim of a geocentric universe. Part four ended with my challenge to Bob to admit that leading cosmologists disagree with him on both of his key points, (1) That there apparently is no center of the universe either indicated by a lack of data or supported by the data that we actually do have, and (2) that the red shift quantization he pleaded for is an illusion, that it is otherwise concordant with the big bang, and thus is not an alternative cosmological model.

5.In part five, I showed that Y-Chromosome Adam evidently lived 140,000 years ago, and that a genetic bottleneck in the human lineage was traced to 74,000 years ago, not the 4,000 years that Bob claimed for both of these. Put this in your errata.

6.I proved that Bob had absolutely no idea what he was talking about with regard to our genetic similarity to sponges or our genomic orthologue with chimpanzees, specifically relating to the Y-chromosome. Specifically Bob claimed that the human genome shared 70% similarity to both sponges and chimpanzees. Neither comment is true. Humans share 70% of the same genes as sponges have, but do not share 70% of the entire genome. If we include non-coding DNA, then our genome is more than 95% identical to the chimpanzee genome. If we only include genes, the ratio is roughly close to 99%.Put this in your errata.

7.I challenged Bob to show that there were ever any mammoths found frozen with tropical flora anywhere near them. Bob claims to have answered this challenge, but he has not. He only cited what he and I had already agreed upon, that there were lots of bones that were neither flash-frozen nor associated with anything tropical. Bob also said mammoths could not possibly survive in the environments where millions of them are known to have lived and I refuted his claims about those conditions too. Put these in your errata.

In part six, Bob was supposed to answer my phylogeny challenge, but instead he deliberately distorted an already poorly-presented and intentionally misleading article from a sensationalized British magazine. Bob also accused me of never having read the article even though I remembered what it said off the top of my head, and he got all of the details in that article wrong. The article was about horizontal gene transfer, it did focus primarily on microbes, and was not about human DNA. Nor did it offer any significant challenge to the "tree-of-life" -at least where that pertains to multicellular organsisms, and especially animals.

My challenge to Bob there was to refute what I showed about overlapping morphology, physiology, and fossils confirming canineandfeline evolution, and the phylogeny challenge where genomic sequencing confirmed the relationships determined by most morphological estimates, but also exposed and corrected errors in classifying bats, aardvarks, and pangolins.

Bob also tried to dismiss the strictest consensus definition of 'transitional species' as "invalid" based on his own gross misunderstanding of taxonomy, and his refusal to honestly admit that anything ever fit that description, much less hundreds of species. This is a point I hope to come back to if we can ever make any progress.

8.Finally Bob asserted that the ancestry of turtles was 'supposed' in lieu of evidence, and that the evolution of flowering plants, backbones, bats, fish, and trees were all similarly 'unknown', and that I could find no reliable science sources to contest his assertion in any of these instances. I proved otherwise on all counts, but particularly with regard to turtles. put this in your errata.

9.In the 7th and final segment of our discussion, Bob accused me of not knowing why Rhodocetus and Pakicetus were considered related to whales. He said this even after I explained about the diagnostic traits in each of their skulls. Bob accused paleontologist, Phillip Gingrich of 'recanting' this fossil,which he did not, and of rendering this animal as a fish,which he did not. Put this in your errata.

Bob's challenge there was to explain whether Pakicetus and Rodhocetus still have cetacean traits regardless whether they still had legs or not?

This is my abbreviated list of the errors that Bob made -minus the incindiary implications, lies of equivocation, pretending that he had a 'higher' understanding of science than I do, and so on. So far Bob has not shown that I made any errors at all. For the sake of brevity, I will be generous and let Bob off all the other errors not listed in this post,unless he repeats them, as he has already started doing. Neither will I try to force him to admit he was wrong on every point listed here that hasn't yet been adequately proved. I won't ignore any of his questions to me; he shouldn't ignore mine either. So I think it reasonable that I should expect a response to everything housed a numbered box or otherwise highlighted of course. To prevent waffling, I would rather he respond by listing any points that he still thinks he can defend, and anything not included in that list should logically be taken as concession. If we can first settle this matter that we both agreed to on the air, then we can begin our debate on phylogeny.

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true." - Friedrich Nietzsche. "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." - Mark Twain

Bob Enyart Admits an Error: I need to correct an error I made about Archaeopteryx. I found this mistake myself. But I should point out that I said nothing like what Aron accused me of saying, that the samples the journal paper reported on:

"were all original biological material, implying that they had not been fossilized at all"¦ and were perhaps even still edible."-Aron misrepresenting Bob on Archaeopteryx

I have no idea what you're referring to with all that. But I did overstate my case to speak of soft "tissue." Changing my mind on this and admitting error also seems to show that you're overstating your case when you write that, "creationists are forbidden to change their minds"¦" The Bible offers methods for falsifying itself; and it says that "faith is"¦ the evidence of things not seen" (Heb. 11:1); and Jesus said, "If I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is not trustworthy" (John 5:31, ISV, i.e., not credible). It is atheistic methodological naturalism that does not even permit a scientist to use the forensic discipline of looking for possible evidence of intention, and for an Intelligent Designer, in the information within living organisms. However I did overstate the case regarding Archaeopteryx to say that its "soft tissue" was found. That characterization went further than the actual findings permit. For this species I should have said that scientists have recovered only some of its original biological material. As for other dinosaur-era species, in their very titles, peer-reviewed papers report discovery of "soft tissue". Of course the Archaeopteryx discovery itself is stunning and is yet another example of the continuing publication of findings of allegedly 65M, 80M, 150M, and billion-year old original biological material (with these and other reports suggesting that these all contain much 14C and mostly non-racemized left-handed amino acids).

ARON, YOU RAISED BIBLE TOPICS FOR DEBATE: In evolution debates with atheists the atheists sometimes steer the debate toward theology and the Bible (as happened to me when debating Eugenie Scott, etc.). In this debate, you requested that we keep the range of topics related to what we covered on air. I'm working to present a strong defense from peer-reviewed research and scientific argumentation. I see that you've now introduced the Bible topics of the Tower of Babel and The Exodus. I'll address those briefly and quickly return to our science debate.

In succession you mentioned three events, the Genesis flood, the tower of Babel, and the Exodus (and it helps that you kept them in chronological order). Of these, whether or not a global flood occurred is the one matter that is definitely relevant to our on-air scientific disagreements.

ARON, ON THE GLOBAL FLOOD: I'll quote your claims against each of these three matters, in order:

"We know for certain that the world-wide flood never happened"¦" -AronRa

Earth: On our planet continents are covered nearly a mile deep in sedimentary strata, often with thousands of square miles of sharp contrast between horizontal layers, frequently with massive swaths of such intersections, called "flat gaps," showing little or even no evidence of erosion between those layers, and with scores of peer-reviewed articles claiming discovery of original biological material from strata allegedly tens of millions of years old (apparently all of which contains 14C and primarily non-racemized left-handed amino acids). These strata contain billions of dead things rapidly buried, such as millions of closed-shelled clams, and seashells atop the world's major mountain ranges, and millions of mammoths buried around the arctic circle, and millions of nautiloids buried in a single narrow limestone layer at the Grand Canyon. Yet secularists posit that Mars (which might have the equivalent of eight inches of water if evenly spread over the surface from the ice at the poles and the ice presumed to be below ground) may have had global-scale flooding. And the same scientists mock anyone who offers evidence that the Earth (which is more than two-thirds covered in ocean water that averages a depth of 2.5 miles) could ever have been flooded.

ARON, ON THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE: Aron, you claim that "there is no such thing as 'absolute truth,'" (presumably you mean even in logic, math, reason, morality, physics, history, etc.), yet you say that you know "for certain" that a global flood never happen on Earth.

"and neither did the tower of Babel [happen]" -AronRa

The Major Darwinian Predictions on Language Falsified: When I debated popular atheist Staks Rosch, he started with this denial of the biblical account of the supernatural origin of languages. That didn't go especially well for him. As on our RSF show on the Origin of Language, I point out to Rosch that the specific Darwinian predictions about the origin of language, like a thousand other secularist predictions, have all been falsified. (This happens daily: Darwinists admit to being "shocked" by new discoveries, which is another way of them saying that their predictions based on their evolutionary model typically fail.) The world's leading linguists have proven Darwin wrong in his belief that some languages are primitive, and that animal barks and grunts can be shown to be steps toward language, and that evidence of language evolution would exist.

For such experts, like Edward Sapir and MIT's Noam Chomsky, though themselves evolutionists, make it clear that:- the expected "primitive languages" do not exist on the face of the Earth, and- that no evidence for the evolution of language has ever been found, and- that dog barks and animal sounds are categorically unlike human language.I've only studied a few languages including some years in Greek class and I've traveled the world from New Zealand to Europe, Fairbanks to Montreal to Puerto Peà±asco, to Turkey and the Middle East, learning what I could from their museums, cultures, and history. Human language appears suddenly in human history and as such, it is another great argument in favor of recent creation and against the alleged millions of years of early human evolution, and specifically now, historians have falsified the confident, specific Darwinian predictions about the origin of language. As I recall, Staks couldn't even try to rebut any of this.

ARON, ON THE EXODUS: Then you introduced the Exodus by quoting a Rabbi who said:

""¦virtually every modern archeologist who has investigated the story of the Exodus, with very few exceptions, agrees that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all."

When Einstein died, he was reading a new book written by his former co-editor of a pair of volumes of scientific papers, Scripta universitatis atque bibliothecae hierosolymitanarum, the publication of which led to the formation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While Einstein strongly rejected his longtime friend's absurd scientific theories, he had a continued interest in and a willingness to read Velikovsky's historical analysis. A month before his death Einstein wrote the last of many letters to his former collaborator on the Velikovsky book that he was about to read, Ages in Chaos, a brilliant work that I highly recommend and summarize in the verse-by-verse study I presented of The Exodus.

Isaac Newton & The Exodus: Velikovsky and Newton came to similar conclusions regarding Egypt's history, for both men wrote extensively about the ancient Egyptian dynasties and both concluding that Manetho's account was far less reliable than the biblical chronology of ancient history. (Of course many sources including the secular journal Biblical Archaeological Review have documented the scores of historical and archaeological discoveries since Velikovsky's death that corroborate hundreds of particulars of the ancient biblical record. Not a single mainstream archeologist in the Americas brings a copy of Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon to their dig sites, and not one of Smith's monetary units have been corroborated, whereas all the many coins mentioned in Scripture have been found and countless historians and archaeologists bring the Scriptures to their work in Asia Minor, Greece, the Mesopotamian Valley, Iran, Israel, etc.). In Ages in Chaos Velikovsky documents significant extra-biblical historical evidence for the Exodus from within Egyptology. Yes, the majority of scholars do not accept the general historic framework of the Exodus. However the entire world speaks of the king of Egypt as "Pharaoh" even though that term did not originate in the Egyptian language. But hundreds of times the Bible mentions Pharaoh, which is a Hebrew word for the king of Egypt based on an Egyptian word for palace. This minor observation might lead some to realize that if they want to better understand world history, language, nations, and culture, it would help them if they consulted the world's long-time number one bestseller: The Bible. So although not in the majority, many historians and archaeologists through the centuries have concluded that the Exodus was an actual historical event and with this, both the secular Jew Velikovsky and the committed Christian theist Isaac Newton, agreed.

ARON, ON THE GRAND CANYON: While providing no evidence, you declared with confidence regarding my:

""¦comments about the Grand Canyon [that]:

Side canyons are carved by rainfall erosion triggering landslides and so on.

There is no indication of rapid stratification, nor is that even possible given these conditions."-AronRa

Would millions of nautiloids the size of your arm standing on their heads fossilized in limestone in the canyon provide evidence of rapid stratification Aron?

That's one bit of evidence I'll offer. I've visited a dozen times including camping and rafting and going specifically to explore the geology of the canyon (as an amateur) and I spent months helping to edit one of the world's most popular writings on the formation of the Grand Canyon. To falsify your claims that the canyon was carved by the river and that the side canyons were carved by rainfall erosion, I point to virtually the rest of the world where there are rivers and rain, but no similar massive canyons with many attendant side canyons.

"There is no indication of rapid stratification"¦" -Aron

Soft Layers: How about the catapulting of this boulder into soft layers?

Just click here to see where this rock-solid indication of rapid stratification lies: It's in the canyon just above the Cambrian-Precambrian interface, which is like trying to run a race and finding out that there's a rock in your shoe in the worst possible place. This enormous rock was catastrophically catapulted here at just the same time when these multiple layers were all simultaneously soft, and rather than shattering the rock (which it would have done if those layers right around it had been deposited over millennia and had hardened into stone), its impact caused a curved deformation of the layers around indicating that these foundational layers were soft all at the same time as the event that launched the boulder.

"There is no indication of rapid stratification"¦" -Aron

Millions of Nautiloids: Aron, in the canyon there is a single seven-foot-thick (on average) layer of limestone that runs the 277 miles of the canyon (and beyond) that covers many hundreds of square miles which contains an average of one nautiloid fossil per square meter.

Many of these nautiloids are larger than your arm, with fossils of tens of millions of these creatures that were buried in an extremely rapid event that killed them all, thus forming yet another important layer of the canyon's walls. Along with many other dead creatures in this one particular limestone layer, 15% of these nautiloids were killed and then fossilized standing on their heads. Yes, vertically. They were caught in such an intense and rapid catastrophic flow that gravity was not able to cause all of their dead carcasses to fall over on their sides.

I have interviewed the scientist who discovered the mass burial site. He has worked in the canyon at the invitation of the U.S. National Park Service, and is the world's leading expert on nautiloid fossils. As is true of many of the world's mass fossil graveyards, this massive nautiloid deposition provides indisputable proof of the extremely rapid formation of a significant layer of limestone near the bottom of the canyon, a layer like the others we've been told about, that allegedly formed at the bottom of a calm and placid sea with slow and gradual sedimentation. But a million nautiloids standing on their heads would beg to differ.

Anyone should be able to agree that this is what is considered hard evidence of rapid stratification.

Aron, you don't try to hide your disdain of creationists. But just in case you or any of our readers are interested in learning about the discovery of this mass nautiloid graveyard and just in case you can stomach listening to a creationist geologist (the very researcher who's work caused Yellowstone Nat'l Park to remove their erroneous exhibit sign that showed a false in situ interpretation of their petrified trees, none of which had root systems), (Find this here if this embedded video doesn't work. And to save you time you can click forward to begin viewing at 16:12 and watch until Dr. Austin mentions "the lower half of the Redwall Limestone"):

"There is no indication of rapid stratification"¦" -Aron

Aron, that's just like you saying, "You don't have original biological material." I commit to our readers that I will try to present evidence and argumentation and not simply make "trust me" declarations that seem to have no place in a written debate. I provided argumentation for rapid strata formation at the Grand Canyon. You didn't even attempt a refutation of what I presented nor of any of the mountains of apparent evidence for the rapid deposition there. Rather, our readers get merely a pronouncement.

The evidence for the rapid catastrophic carving of the canyon is as strong as the evidence for the rapid deposition of the layers.

Scores of Missing Drainage Basins: Regarding your claim Aron that rain runoff formed the side canyons, I wonder WHAT drainage basins would have led into those side canyons? And how would rain runoff erode through 5,000 vertical feet of rock, with many of the side canyons being as deep as the main canyon? The south rim of the canyon averages 1200 feet lower than the north rim because the general lay of the land slopes to the south, yet you claim that the side canyons, including the dozens of huge canyons entering the Grand Canyon from the south all result from rainfall drainage. So you require massive drainage basins, which don't exist, to flow in opposing directions, with half of them against the general lay of the land. Rather than that uniformitarian story, a growing number of geologists are realizing that especially unique features may have unique causes.

Marble Canyon and the Inner Gorge: Aron, this next satellite image shows the crack in the crust of the earth at Marble Canyon that leads into the Grand Canyon. I've rafted here to see this close up. Notice the barbed (BACKWARD) canyons (with many more out of sight), not running from the upriver direction but against the general lay of the land. These barbed canyons provide more evidence falsifying the claim that this was carved by slow uniformitarian drainage processes. In reality, more than 2,000 CUBIC MILES of Mesozoic sediments have been swept away. (A simple drive through the nearby Navajo Indian reservation and on the state highways in the vicinity of the Canyon shows the most casual observer that a MASSIVE chunk of surface strata has been removed over an enormous distance of hundreds of miles in length, scores of miles wide, and hundreds to thousands of feet deep"¦ GONE; it's just all gone; and I offer that as more powerful evidence against any claim that a river did it.) In reality, when that great denudation of the land occurred suddenly, the ground beneath it (which was under tremendous pressure as the subsurface is everywhere on Earth), arched upward and cracked. This crack, seen below, is also what forms the entire inner gorge of the Canyon, a very narrow channel through hard rock as much as 1,200 feet deep, whereas rivers around the world do not and cannot carve such a feature because sediment buildup prevents their currents from continually digging deeper even into soft-rock beds. Thus rivers do not forever get deeper and deeper. So notice this crack from the subsurface arching upward and the attendant stress fractures (which were not formed by non-existent drainage basins):

While I've debated plenty of atheists (including somewhat famous ones) who couldn't say for sure whether or not they existed (it's that "no absolute truth" thing), I'll assume that both you and I agree Aron that the existence of the Grand Canyon is a fact. And both sides agree that it was formed by water. Evolutionists claim it took a lot of time and a little water, and creationists claim that it was a little time and a lot of water. We can both present our evidence. But what you seem to do Aron is to pretend that the FACT of the canyon's existence automatically includes the "lot of time " claim. That is arbitrary. But a lot of time and a little water is not part of the fact of the canyon, but an interpretation. And it's an interpretation that comes with significant difficulties and against plenty of apparently contrary evidence. Just like there is increasing division within the ranks of paleontologists regarding dinosaur soft tissue with more and more siding with the affirmative (like the creationists), you can expect that more and more geologists will side with the creationists in our argument that the river did not carve the canyon, nor remove 2,000 cubic miles of strata.

"There is no indication of rapid stratification"¦" -Aron

Millions of Missing Years Worth of Deposition and Erosion: My last bit of evidence I'll remind you about is what I offered to you in Round 3, when I presented this photo of the Grand Canyon and pointed out something that not one scientist in the history of science would EVER conclude by studying the canyon and it's strata, that TENS OF MILLIONS OF YEARS OF THE ALLEGED GEOLOGIC COLUMN ARE MISSING BETWEEN LAYERS WITH BOUNDARIES THAT LOOK JUST LIKE BOUNDARIES FOR THE ADMITTED SEQUENTIAL LAYERS, often with flat gaps SHOWING LITTLE OR NO EVIDENCE OF EROSION OVER HUNDREDS OF SQUARE MILES:

This next photo contains explicitly marks the evidence that you dismissed without argumentation. I wonder how carefully you and other evolutionists considered this argument while looking at this image (or at a thousand others like it online and at Google Earth):

So Aron, here's that argument again: According to geologists everywhere including in this Geology of the Grand Canyon report available from the U.S. National Park Service, the Grand Canyon is missing the entire Cenozoic and Mesozoic geologic eras (off the top) and more than 100 million years of strata are missing from the middle of the Paleozoic (the entire Ordovician and Silurian periods are not there). You can't help but see the flat boundaries between strata which in many places lack evidence of erosion between the strata (even with, for example, rain drop impressions atop one layer not eroded but preserved by the layer above it). So the virtually worldwide depositional layers exposed in the Grand Canyon provide evidence that strata, including dinosaur-bearing strata globally, were deposited rapidly. So just as the system of large stratified canyons at Mount St. Helens formed rapidly in 1980, and the river flowing from Spirit Lake didn't carve those canyons but the canyons formed the river, so to with the Grand Canyon, by this modern analog, and by much hard evidence like millions of nautiloids fossilized standing on their heads, the deposition and carving were both rapid.

Aron, this is another pronouncement without an offer of scientific evidence. I'm making an effort to provide evidence for the readers and not simply make arguments that consist of only: "trust me."

Since to reject the existence of dinosaur soft tissue you wrote that you talked to one of the guys and he told you something about Horner liking to stir things up, perhaps you'll be comfortable with me reporting to you something that was said to me last week by a geologist who has experience in nuclear physics.

Minimal Radioactivity; Neutron-Capture Resistant 13C: This old-earth graduate of the School of Mines in Golden, Colorado wasn't surprised to hear that creationists have been able to document (mostly from secular journals) 14C being found around the world in petrified wood, coal, oil, limestone, graphite, natural gas, amber, marble, dinosaur fossils, and even in supposedly billion-year-old diamonds. Regarding the widespread secondary assumption of old-earthers who propose that much of this C-14 must have come from C-13 and neutron capture (or some similar nuclear reaction), this geologist told me to check out the Neutron Capture article on Wikipedia (with its "barns" cross sections chart). He worked for some years bombarding various elements with neutrons to create isotopes for private industry. He said that it is the heavier elements that readily absorb neutrons but that the relatively light element of carbon is frequently used by scientists to slow down neutrons but in practice Carbon-12 and Carbon-13 do not readily capture neutrons. And as I pointed out in Round Three, there is scarce crustal radioactivity as reported by the U.S.G.S. in coal, basalt, shales, granite, fly ash, etc.

Creationist 14C Argument Informed By Peer-Reviewed Science: I don't know what your basing your opinion on (since you often don't provide evidence or argumentation), but I've read the creationist literature supporting the existence of residual 14C, and some of the primary peer-reviewed uniformitarian papers trying to explain 14C where its not expected. These papers include: Natural production of radionuclides in geological formations in the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear Particle Physics by Florkowski, and Possible subsurface production of carbon"14 in Geophysical Research Letters by Zito, et al. From Florkowski, who undoubtedly rejects young-earth interpretations, we learn the expected, that "In rocks with low U and Th content the production of 14C atoms is low"¦" but that in Uranium ores there is one to a few percent modern carbon (not unlike what was reported for the soft-tissue Mosasaur excavated out of marine sediments). And Florkowski reports that Jull, et al., in 1987 "measured the 14C concentration in samples of U- and Th- ores by accelerator mass spectrometry" and concluded that "the neutron reactions are not of importance due to the low neutron flux"¦" [That flux is the short distance traveled by underground neutrons (before capture in more readily receptive heavier atoms)]. Florkowski isn't too happy with Jull for not considering Oxygen-17 neutron capture, but he approves of Jull considering 14C production from alpha and exotic decay of Boron and Radium.

Nitrogen More Neutron Friendly; 14C Quantities Too Constant for Contamination: From Zito we learn that neutron capture is far more than 10,000 times more likely to occur with Nitrogen-14 as it is with Carbon-13. "The [Oxygen-17] and 14N reactions produce about 66 percent and 34 percent, respectively. The 13C reaction produces about .001 percent"¦" Thus as Dr. Paul Giem writes for the Geoscience Research Institute, published in the UK's [much maligned] Biblical Creation Society's journal Origins, since nitrogen-14 captures neutrons so much more readily than does carbon-13, samples with even tiny amounts of nitrogen would dramatically increase carbon dates such that, "If neutron capture is a significant source of carbon-14 in a given sample, radiocarbon dates should vary wildly with the nitrogen content of the sample. I know of no such data." If you do know of such data, Aron, that would help falsify this 14C young-earth argument. Also, Giem reports that, "The hypothesis that machine background [noise] can account for this Carbon-14 has been universally rejected by researchers in the field, and for good reason." And see Giem's review of the statistical clustering of widespread modern carbon results from fossils, which strongly argues against in situ contamination, since it's wildly improbable that such contamination would generate consistent 14C quantities across massive coal beds and among specimens as diverse as "wood, whale bone, petroleum and coal, all to roughly the same extent."

ARON ON BOB'S READING COMPREHENSION: Aron, if I misunderstand something you've written, or something in a source I'm referencing, I welcome your effort to help me, and the readers, see your point. It makes it more difficult though when you throw out mocking and demeaning comments. (The above correction was a matter separate from your following quote, for you wrote this in your response to the questions of whether or not you were out-of-date regarding the dinosaur biological material finds.)

Summarizing our disagreement over dinosaur soft tissue discoveries, you wrote to me:

As is typical of creationists, you misunderstood what your own citations said, and what they mean. You also misunderstood what I said about them -due to your previously noted problem with reading comprehension.-AronRa about Bob Enyart

You haven't shown Aron that I, nor the leading creation ministries, typically misunderstand our citations. At the risk of being further mocked, let me quote for you another description of me, one that PZ Myers (who shares your opinion) pasted into his blog. This is an assessment of my grasp of a broad range of scientific topics that was written by a well-received British author after he and I had a lengthy debate on evolution:

Richard Dawkins once said that "if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." It rapidly became clear that Bob was none of these things. For a start, I know a fair bit about evolution and genetics. But when it came to familiarity with the arguments, he was way ahead of me. On epigenetics, RNA/DNA chemistry, and animal physiology, I was hopelessly outclassed. Bob is not ignorant. And it is pretty clear he is neither stupid nor insane. He came across, in fact, as extremely intelligent.-British Author and Darwinist James Hannam about Bob Enyart

Aron, either you're just trying to score some kind of debate point with those who already agree with you, or perhaps you really think that I cannot understand you, nor the dozens of papers I reviewed for this debate.

Even if we conclude differently, you might be surprised how much further you could get in communicating your position by being polite and simply pointing out what you think is a misunderstanding on my part, rather than you coming across as just plain mean. Your avatar is your choice for how you present yourself to friends and your opposition (and even dragging down the LoR standards). I knew that going into this debate. Of course you will behave as you choose, and I'll suggest you consider behaving more kindly whenever I choose. Fair enough? At any rate, more respectful dialogue will make it easier for some of the readers to follow the actual evidence being offered.Just as I'm about to post this for Round Four, I saw that you posted a second time in Round Three. I'm eager to read that. And I'm looking forward to getting to Phylogeny, which topic I think will go even better for the creationist side than have any of our exchanges so far.

ROUND FOUR QUESTIONS FOR ARONRA

BE-Question #5, Preparing for the next round, and presuming Darwinian deep time, Aron, If Extensive Genetic Sophistication Appears a Hundred Millions Years BEFORE Any Organs or Organisms that Require that Sophistication, would that be evidence that would:A) strengthen evolutionary theory, orB) challenge evolutionary theory?

BE-Question #6, In This Debate Is It the Creationist or the Evolutionist who has offered the more substantive defense of our opposing positions regarding:- the discovery of dinosaur soft-tissue- whether or not Newton rejected natural explanations for supernatural origins- residual Carbon-14 in fossils, and- the rates of the deposition and erosion that formed the Grand Canyonincluding evidence, original source material, scientific argumentation, and peer-reviewed support for our positions. Was it the atheist or the creationist who offered the more substantive defense on these matters?

My apologies everyone. I should have posted this a few days ago. This last month has been my busiest so far, beginning with the Reason Rally and the national convention of American Atheists. A week later, I met with associates in San Francisco and New Zealand on my way to the global atheist convention in Australia. When I got back last week, I had to give a presentation in Illinois and another one this last weekend in Arkansas. This coming weekend, I'll be in Wisconsin, and I have another presentation to give three weeks later in California. In the meantime, I've racked up several hundred unread emails owing to my limited availability online lately. All this on top of a full-time job and the demands of a large family -which usually takes priority. So I haven't been able to look at this site in a whole month, and obviously can't spend much time here now either. However, I do expect things to calm down a bit from here on, and I will not take this long to respond again. At best I only have an hour or two per day this week that I can play in this forum, but I should still be done by Thursday.

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true." - Friedrich Nietzsche. "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." - Mark Twain

AronRa wrote:This debate was supposed to be over the mistakes you made while I was on your show, yet you still haven't conceded or even acknowledged any of those many errors, and you just keep introducing new gaffs. For example, your comments about the Grand Canyon: There is no indication of rapid stratification, nor is that even possible given these conditions. Side canyons are carved by rainfall erosion triggering landslides and so on. There ARE obvious erosional unconformities at some locations in the Canyon, and I'll be happy to show geologic charts, pictures, and full explanations at another time. The same goes for your nonsense about Carbon14 and what you still don't understand about phylogentics -regarding roundworms and kangaroos. But as these are new errors that were not brought up on your show, then they are outside the scope of our debate. I will not be side-tracked by them,

BobEnyart wrote:[....another 2,500 words of off-topic distraction]

I am so tempted to take this bait!

It is amusing on multiple levels that you brought up Martian geology. That was included in my coursework. When I took historical geology, both my teachers for lecture and lab were Christians, however neither of them believed in the Noachian flood. How could they? On the first day of class, the lecture teacher said that any student in that class who still believed in the flood would not believe in it next week. Over the course of that week, all they did was show geological formations all over the world -including the grand canyon- which flood geology could neither account for nor admit.

BobEnyart wrote:I need to correct an error I made about Archaeopteryx. I found this mistake myself.

No you didn't. Several of us pointed this out to you first.

But I should point out that I said nothing like what Aron accused me of saying, that the samples the journal paper reported on:

"were all original biological material, implying that they had not been fossilized at all"¦ and were perhaps even still edible."-Aron misrepresenting Bob on Archaeopteryx

I have no idea what you're referring to with all that.

Then let me remind you:

brettpalmer wrote:

Isotelus wrote:It's almost like he thinks that these scientists are cracking open bones and lo and behold! Soft tissue! Look this blood vessel is still stretchy! Wee!

Bob refers to the soft tissue in the clip above at the 3:06 - 3:20 minute marks as looking as if it just came from a "butcher shop!"

Now Bob, will you admit that you actually said that? Or do you want to keep pretending that I misrepresented you?

ARON, ON THE EXODUS: Then you introduced the Exodus by quoting a Rabbi who said:

""¦virtually every modern archeologist who has investigated the story of the Exodus, with very few exceptions, agrees that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all."

When Einstein died, he was reading a new book written by his former co-editor of a pair of volumes of scientific papers, Scripta universitatis atque bibliothecae hierosolymitanarum, the publication of which led to the formation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While Einstein strongly rejected his longtime friend's absurd scientific theories, he had a continued interest in and a willingness to read Velikovsky's historical analysis. A month before his death Einstein wrote the last of many letters to his former collaborator on the Velikovsky book that he was about to read, Ages in Chaos, a brilliant work that I highly recommend and summarize in the verse-by-verse study I presented of The Exodus.

I have read Velikovsky. I was a young man then, and knew next to nothing about history or cosmology or much of anything else, but I could still tell when this psychiatrist had gotten his astronomy wrong. I needn't critique him though. Carl Sagan already did that well enough when he pointed out that many of Velikovsky's ideas were wrong, silly, and 'in gross contradiction to the facts'.

Would millions of nautiloids the size of your arm standing on their heads fossilized in limestone in the canyon provide evidence of rapid stratification Aron?

No, not even if they existed. Limestone can't form rapidly, (certainly not in the situation you're talking about) and the conditions you describe are not consistent throughout the site you claim, even according to other Bible-believing Christians.

"The nautiloids of Nautiloid Canyon are claimed to be aligned, indicating that they died in a strong current and yet, this writer visited this deposit in July, 1995, and found no alignment of any nautaloids anywhere in the Canyon. The authors ignore the stratification of fossils which are clearly found in layers--not mixed up as a flood would suggest."--John N. Clayton, author of 'Does God Exist'

Coincidentally Eugenie Scott gave a speech on the Grand Canyon at the G.A.C. in Melbourne, as she often does. In it she gave many instances of geology that young earth creationists simply can't account for. That talk hasn't been released on video yet. She has done several others, but I won't provide the links since you wouldn't watch them anyway. For the moment, I'll just quote her:

"I have examined these nautiloids in only a few localities within the Grand Canyon National Park, to which he [Steve Austin] was kind enough to direct me, where I noted that a nautiloid fossil occurred about once every 4 or 5 square meters. From this I infer that either Austin has collected most of the samples from these localities or the abundance of nautiloids claimed is exaggerated. However, unlike Austin, I hesitate to extrapolate from observations at a few isolated localities to a huge area. Furthermore, most of the nautiloid fossils I saw, and that Austin illustrates, were intact. Could they have survived the turbulence that must occur in a fast moving, subaqueous, debris flow? In nature, mass-kill events certainly occur , by red tides, volcanic eruptions, and storm-induced processes flows, for example. However, in order to recognize a mass-kill, we need to understand the population structure of the animals concerned, and to consider factors such as episodic spawning, variable growth rates, the complex diurnal behavior of cephalopods, and so on.Evidence bearing on the question "Did this nautiloid assemblage accumulate instantaneously or over many generations?" should be present in the deposit itself. Do the dolomitization and the prominent chert horizon overlying the nautiloid bed represent diagenesis during a hiatus in deposition? Similarly, are Austin's "water escape tubes" actually poorly preserved animal burrows (Skolithos)? High concentrations of fossil nautiloids occur elsewhere, for example, in Morocco and in the Czech Republic. Ferretti and Krà­z (1995) describe several such examples in the Silurian of the Prague Basin and attribute them to the effects of surface currents or re-deposition in shallower environments by storm events during broad scale fluctuations in sea level. Why not the same in the Grand Canyon?"

"There is no indication of rapid stratification"¦" -Aron

Soft Layers: How about the catapulting of this boulder into soft layers?

Why should I assume it was 'catapulted'? Why not moved by a glacier and absorbed into a sedimentary deposition? Or if it was catapulted, why not from one of the nearby volcanos?

"There is no indication of rapid stratification"¦" -Aron

Millions of Nautiloids: Aron, in the canyon there is a single seven-foot-thick (on average) layer of limestone that runs the 277 miles of the canyon (and beyond) that covers many hundreds of square miles which contains an average of one nautiloid fossil per square meter.

This does not support rapid stratification. I have personally quarried a Cretaceous beach just like what you describe. It was eroded and exposed by the Red river. What it revealed was a wash-up of thousands of ammonites accumulated over a very long period of time.

This was a fun time by the way. I brought my young son along on an invertebrate paleontology field trip. He and I collected and documented these fossils ourselves. Then we took them into the lab. I used the demineralizing acid bath to prepare random soil samples, which he examined under the microscope to sort out microfossils.

Also notice the geologic diagrams. Note how the inland seaway is identified by the discovery of ancient shorelines like this one, wherein the depth was found to be variable over vast periods. Also notice how depositional layers may be turned and eroded at variable thicknesses, such that you as a layman would never notice the erosion. A deposit that is more than 100 feet thick on one side can be barely present -or completely eroded on another. Whole intermediate layers can be completely eroded out in some areas, before the environment changes and deposition begins again, and wind can erode away the current layers too. This is exactly what we see in the Grand Canyon.

I have interviewed the scientist who discovered the mass burial site. He has worked in the canyon at the invitation of the U.S. National Park Service, and is the world's leading expert on nautiloid fossils. As is true of many of the world's mass fossil graveyards, this massive nautiloid deposition provides indisputable proof of the extremely rapid formation of a significant layer of limestone near the bottom of the canyon, a layer like the others we've been told about, that allegedly formed at the bottom of a calm and placid sea with slow and gradual sedimentation. But a million nautiloids standing on their heads would beg to differ.

You don't have millions of nautiloids standing on their heads. If there are some that do, they are intact indicating a more placid conclusion. Most likely these died in a seasonal post-mating death -as still occurs with modern nautiloids. As I understand it, the reason some of these were thought to be vertical were poorly preserved burrows being mistaken for escape tubes. Otherwise, these being orthocones, (the earliest of the now-extinct ammonites) it is likely that if this were a 'mass kill', it might be one in which their buoyancy is distended, causing the shells to point upward. It's only relatively recent [Mesozoic] varieties that have adopted the familiar spiral pattern. (And yes, we have transitions to show there too.) The only way they could have held a horizontal position would be will a balance of water balast in the internal chambers. In death and in decomposition, that obviously would have been abandoned. Thus again, no evidence to oppose the global scientific consensus against rapid stratification. But as I say, there is apparently no indication that they were 'standing on their heads' in the first place.

Aron, you don't try to hide your disdain of creationists.

I don't suffer fools or liars, and see no need to apologize for that.

But just in case you or any of our readers are interested in learning about the discovery of this mass nautiloid graveyard and just in case you can stomach listening to a creationist geologist (the very researcher who's work caused Yellowstone Nat'l Park to remove their erroneous exhibit sign that showed a false in situ interpretation of their petrified trees, none of which had root systems), (Find this here if this embedded video doesn't work. And to save you time you can click forward to begin viewing at 16:12 and watch until Dr. Austin mentions "the lower half of the Redwall Limestone"):

I don't know how you can be led about by people like AnswersinGenesis, who can be so easily shown to be lying about so much so often. Seriously why doesn't that bother you?

Since it turned out that I was right about there not being any original biological material ever yet confirmed, does that mean that I'm right about there being no indication of rapid stratification too?

The evidence for the rapid catastrophic carving of the canyon is as strong as the evidence for the rapid deposition of the layers.

So none for either one then? However we do have a heckuva lot of evidence for slow deposition in various environments, including evaporites over a very long period of time.

Scores of Missing Drainage Basins: Regarding your claim Aron that rain runoff formed the side canyons, I wonder WHAT drainage basins would have led into those side canyons?

There obviously don't need to be drainage basins to add to the runoff of the canyon walls. Run-off from the plateau into the recesses of the main canyon would cause peripheral land-slides carving out side-canyons. Since these are guided only by the plunge into the main, these side canyons would often be turned 'backward' according to the direction of the winding river. How they eroded would be self-evident should you allow yourself to see it.

However there is one drainage basin that is noticeably absent. Your notion does require a vast reservoir to suddenly collapse into this canyon. You can't show where it is because it never existed, because this canyon did not form the way you say. There are many many other reasons why it couldn't have happened your way. Instead it formed the way real geologists say, the objective ones who haven't sworn to uphold a baseless religious doctrine by denying any and all evidence that might ever arise should it contradict their a-priori assumed conclusion. For at least the last few hundred years, a growing number of geologists see no reason to take any portion of Genesis seriously at all.

Marble Canyon and the Inner Gorge: Aron, this next satellite image shows the crack in the crust of the earth at Marble Canyon that leads into the Grand Canyon.

Eugenie Scott said that although there are a series of faults running through the canyon, the 'crack in the crust of the earth' [described by creationist Gary Parker] is a "tectonic feature totally unknown in the peer-reviewed scientific literature". So I'm gonna ask for a citation, and I'm betting that you won't have one,other than "trust me".

"The same goes for your nonsense about Carbon14"¦",Aron

Aron, this is another pronouncement without an offer of scientific evidence. I'm making an effort to provide evidence for the readers and not simply make arguments that consist of only: "trust me."

No, you're trying to pull out new arguments that you already know are off-topic in an attempt to obfuscate the fact that absolutely everything you asserted on your show was wrong. You don't have accountability enough to admit that, so you're trying to put up a smoke screen.

you wrote that you talked to one of the guys and he told you something about Horner liking to stir things up, perhaps you'll be comfortable with me reporting to you something that was said to me last week by a geologist who has experience in nuclear physics.

Minimal Radioactivity; Neutron-Capture Resistant 13C: This old-earth graduate of the School of Mines in Golden, Colorado wasn't surprised to hear that creationists have been able to document (mostly from secular journals) 14C being found around the world in petrified wood, coal, oil, limestone, graphite, natural gas, amber, marble, dinosaur fossils, and even in supposedly billion-year-old diamonds.

Then can I quote WildwoodClaire1, a geologist I know on YouTube? She says, "the amounts [of Carbon14] found in diamonds and ancient coal are so small as to be within the margin of testing error; the reality in any given test could just as well be 0;" I may be a bit more permissive. She also said that "one hypothesis is that, occasionally a diamond or carbon in coal may interact with neutrons created by interaction of decay particles from nearby radioactive material, such as uranium. In such a case nitrogen 14, a common element within diamonds (they are NEVER pure carbon), could acquire a neutron to form C14. That's what happens in the atmosphere when C14 is formed, only the Nitrogen atom takes up an with energetic neutron created by interaction of cosmic rays with atoms."

Not that any of that matters at the moment, since I told you last month that these are off-topic arguments, which I would not distract myself with -since we're only supposed to be debating the points made on your show, and this wasn't one of them.

Creationist 14C Argument Informed By Peer-Reviewed Science: I don't know what your basing your opinion on (since you often don't provide evidence or argumentation), but I've read the creationist literature

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. You said that as though it were somehow respectable, as if that weren't the least credible, worst possible source in history that anyone could ever turn to, as if that was to any degree honest, accurate, or accountable, and not already discredited by everyone everywhere.

The Bible offers methods for falsifying itself;

No it doesn't. It encourages readers to assume the prescribed conclusion at the onset, threatens punishment against any degree of doubt, praises foolish gullibility, and demands that belief must not be questioned or tested. Nothing that is really true would demand any of these requirements.

and it says that "faith is"¦ the evidence of things not seen" (Heb. 11:1);

Yes, the Bible encourages you to believe what you do not see, [John 20:29] not to believe what you do see, [2Cor 4:18] and relies on the logical fallacy of circular arguments routing back to an assumed conclusion [Romans 1:20].

and Jesus said, "If I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is not trustworthy" (John 5:31, ISV, i.e., not credible).

Yeah, and in the next sentence, he presents -as evidence- another assumed conclusion, that of an allegedly unquestionable authority, pleading that the Jews should believe him simply because he says so. You don't want to debate me on the Bible either. Save that for another time.

It is atheistic methodological naturalism that does not even permit a scientist to use the forensic discipline of looking for possible evidence of intention, and for an Intelligent Designer, in the information within living organisms.

That is a lie, an accusation which you cannot justify with any citation from any source anywhere. You made that up, and you're wrong -again, as always. Of course science is permitted -and encouraged- to seek out any possible evidence of anything, and would love to see indication of an intelligent designer. The only trick is that you never had evidence you could show to be possible which ever implied deliberate design or the type of designer you're pleading for, or the method such a djinn would use. Instead, you deny absolutely all the evidence we do have -which all implies something else, something you reject out-of-hand according to your own dishonest bias -which you are still trying to project onto others.

As for the lies of equivocation that you're still trying to employ, we begin with the doctrinal obligations that I already posted, wherein leading creationist organizations all openly admit that their refusal to change their minds regardless what evidence may ever arise. In contrast, science is required to test all claims and question all assumptions with no penalties applied to what anyone believes. The only thing that might matter is why you believe it -since faith is prohibited as dishonest. It isn't that there is some rule against looking for evidence of intent; it's that there was never any indication of intent. If there was, you would have shown some by now. If such evidence ever existed, you wouldn't have given the performance you did.

As for other dinosaur-era species, in their very titles, peer-reviewed papers report discovery of "soft tissue". Of course the Archaeopteryx discovery itself is stunning and is yet another example of the continuing publication of findings of allegedly 65M, 80M, 150M, and billion-year old original biological material (with these and other reports suggesting that these all contain much 14C and mostly non-racemized left-handed amino acids).

Once again I remind you, all that has been confirmed are decomposed break down products. Some of which show elasticity only after they've been demineralized. This involves an acid bath which could also soften hard bone. So to say that these are 'soft' compared to the fully lithofied surrounding matrix isn't saying much. It certainly doesn't say what you want it to.

Aron, you claim that "there is no such thing as 'absolute truth,'" (presumably you mean even in logic, math, reason, morality, physics, history, etc.),

You presume too much -especially after I have already explained this to you repeatedly. Most of the fields you just listed include proof, but not 'truth'. Those that have truth instead cannot have it be 'absolute'. You're referring to a comment I made in one of my videos, wherein I explained that humans cannot honestly claim knowledge of 'absolute truth'. I said that word combination implies knowledege that is both perfect and complete as well as infallable. That is beyond the boundaries of human cognizance or comprehension. Absolute truth doesn't mean the same thing as an absolute fact. The word 'truth' implies comprehension from a human perspective. That's the point that I think you're missing here.

yet you say that you know "for certain" that a global flood never happen on Earth.

Yes, absolute certainty is different from absolute truth. I define truth as it relates more to than mere data. However I was using a higher definition of 'truth' than my creationist opponants. I asked a few of these guys recently to clarify what that term meant to them, and it turns out they only meant statements that are simply and certainly true, as opposed to being definitely false; that's it. I wish I had known that before; I wouldn't have wasted so much time thinking beyond their depth. Yes, by that definition we can know absolute truth with certainty, including the fact that reality is real and that we exist within it. It is absolutely certain that there was never any global flood. We know this without doubt or possibility of error. It is absolutely certain that languages have evolved, that French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian are all derivations of Latin, for example. It is absolutely certain that languages were already diversified prior to the construction of the tower of Babel[on] which was apparently begun by Hammurabi around 1750 BCE. Remember that we already had the origins of today's numerous distinct cultures already dispersed around the world thousands of years before then, and that is absolutely certain too. Likewise we know that the fables in Genesis were predated by similar stories of Semitic and Sumerian ancestry, where the same elements were present in the previous polytheism of the grandparents of the Biblical authors. There is no extra-Biblical evidence for any of the fables in the Bible, and no indication that the Bible got anything right at all. It certainly isn't more accurate than the current scientific consensus on any point. All of this could be considered 'absolute truth' (by your definition) because it is verifiably true.

As I explained to you before, (must I repeat everything?) once something has been proved, it can't be made ambiguous again. That's what 'proof' means; an overwhelming preponderance of evidence uncontested by anything, and which supports only one available conclusion over any other.

Even if we can't prove for certain that reality itself is real, we can easily show that we are still subject to the rules imposed on us by this reality, even if that reality is no more than an illusory video game. You could be a character in a movie, but whether you're on film, TV, or DVD, the reality is the same; it is still real from our perspective, so the philosopher's argument is useless and moot. Your reality is still real to you either way.

With regard to the flood, imagine that the facts that you have, (the ones that are accurate) are pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. You appear to be showing off individual pieces unaware of periferal pieces which complete a very different picture than the one you're pleading for. Your model doesn't only fail in contrast with paleontology; you're arguing for something which other creationists have already discovered does not work in any other application either, like petroleum sourcing -for example. Ask Glenn Morton for details.

Now imagine that the few accurate facts that you can point to, and all the wealth of accurate facts you refuse to accept collectively assemble the whole of geology, but that geology is itself only one peice of an even larger puzzle. The geology that is concordant with evolution is also concordant with all other disciplines of science too. I have long wanted to do another video series on that individually titled: How Geology disproves the Noahician floodHow meteorology disproves the Noahician floodHow archaeology disproves the Noahician floodHow zoology disproves the Noahician floodHow mythology disproves the Noahician flood

Each of these would be just as fast-paced and information-packed as either of my other series, because there is just that much proof against this repugnant fable. The story of Noah's flood is a pathetic re-hash of previous polytheism, and is loosly based on an actual event that was centered on the city of Shurippak around 2900 BCE. The actual archaeological account is concordant with history, with anthropology, dendrochronolgy, ice cores, varves, and everything else. What you're promoting instead doesn't match anything at all because it obviously never really happened the way you say. Once our current debate is finished, I will gleefully anihilate your flood myth from every available angle, while simultaneously proving evolution through phylogeny. But as I said, your claims about that now were not brought up while I was on your show, and are therefore outside the scope of this debate.

The Major Darwinian Predictions on Language Falsified: When I debated popular atheist Staks Rosch, he started with this denial of the biblical account of the supernatural origin of languages. That didn't go especially well for him. As on our RSF show on the Origin of Language, I point out to Rosch that the specific Darwinian predictions about the origin of language, like a thousand other secularist predictions, have all been falsified. (This happens daily: Darwinists admit to being "shocked" by new discoveries, which is another way of them saying that their predictions based on their evolutionary model typically fail.)

This is another lie. You're really shooting yourself in the foot here. You cannot point to one 'secularist-Darwinian' [evolutionary science] prediction that was ever falsified. The evolutionary position does not 'typically' fail, but has been continuously vindicated dispite an unrelenting battery of tests. However creation "science" consistently fails every test. Remember that all creationist claims exist in only two categories, those that are both untestable and unsupported by evidence, and those that have been tested and were disproved. Creationists predicted we would never find any of the once-missing 'links' in the human evolutionary lineage from typical apes. We did, and we've found way more than we ever needed. Creationists predicted we would never find a fossil transition with a half-wing, because there would be no purpose for it. We found it anyway -many times over- and we found a profoundly advantageous purpose for it too. We also found most of the fish-with-feet that y'all predicted we would never find. Creationists predicted we would never be able to demonstrate natural mechanisms for the building blocks of life, but we did. Y'all predicted we would never demonstrate the spontaneous self-assembly of riboneucleotides either, and we did that too. You also predicted that we would never observe one species evolving into another species. I heard that repeated ad nauseum throughout my youth, yet now that we've seen that happen too, your lot turned around to pretend that prediction was never made, that the mutability of species was already known for centuries. You can't have it both ways, man. Creation 'science' has a track record of absolute failure. You were unable to provide any exception to this rule when we were on the air. Now you have a second chance. I say there has never been one untestable claim supportive of your mystic designer which was actually supported by positively indicative evidence. So there is nothing you can honestly say you actually 'know' about God. And creation science has never made one testable prediction that passed any scientific test either. Neither can you show one occasion in which evolution was ever falsified, much less thousands of such cases. The best you could possibly find would be something like where some scientists once proposed that fish crawled out of the water before they had legs, and then we found fossil fish that already had complete legs before they ventured onto the land. However that is a choice between viable options, which is not the same thing you seem to be implying. Otherwise you will never find any instance in which the predictions of evolution were falsified the way predictions of creationism always have been. Go ahead and dig out Mendeley or any other science resource, and see if whether you''ll prove my point.

The world's leading linguists have proven Darwin wrong in his belief that some languages are primitive, and that animal barks and grunts can be shown to be steps toward language, and that evidence of language evolution would exist.

For such experts, like Edward Sapir and MIT's Noam Chomsky, though themselves evolutionists, make it clear that:

- the expected "primitive languages" do not exist on the face of the Earth,

I'll need to see your citations, because even I can cite examples of languages emerging under direct observation amongst people with no natural language of their own.

and that no evidence for the evolution of language has ever been found,

Yes it has, and the evidence we have definitely disproves the notion you want to promote instead. We have found examples of primate troupes using one particular sound to evoke an appropriate response to a leopard as opposed to another sound which is only used upon the discovery of a snake, and which evokes a different response. These are the basics of language, and we can show morphological adaptations for these in Homo erectus, a collection of pre-sapien demes which you and your ilk cannot account for, or likely even acknowledge.

and - that dog barks and animal sounds are categorically unlike human language.

And the method of communication used by humans is categorically different than the method of communication used by bees, which is categorically different than the method of communcation used by whales. However each does count as a complex system, and may even count as a form of language. While dolphins can definitely be taught to understand human language, we seem unable to understand theirs. That does not mean that they don't have a language. They evidently do. Elephants apparently do too.

I've only studied a few languages including some years in Greek class and I've traveled the world from New Zealand to Europe, Fairbanks to Montreal to Puerto Peà±asco, to Turkey and the Middle East, learning what I could from their museums, cultures, and history. Human language appears suddenly in human history and as such, it is another great argument in favor of recent creation and against the alleged millions of years of early human evolution,

Let's not forget that you're arguing for a fable about mud-packing primitives trying to build a tower to reach the sun -or something equally ridiculous, something that could not have threatened any god there might have been. This story is a classic example of a tall tale and not remotely similar to any actual history. That's why there are no great arguments for the magical conjuring of a young universe. There are only pathetic excuses wholly contested by all the evidence available anywhere -as even other creationists will tell you, even those like Frank Turek.

ARON ON BOB'S READING COMPREHENSION: Aron, if I misunderstand something you've written, or something in a source I'm referencing, I welcome your effort to help me, and the readers, see your point. It makes it more difficult though when you throw out mocking and demeaning comments. (The above correction was a matter separate from your following quote, for you wrote this in your response to the questions of whether or not you were out-of-date regarding the dinosaur biological material finds.)

Summarizing our disagreement over dinosaur soft tissue discoveries, you wrote to me:

As is typical of creationists, you misunderstood what your own citations said, and what they mean. You also misunderstood what I said about them -due to your previously noted problem with reading comprehension.-AronRa about Bob Enyart

Yes I certainly did. First of all, I never denied dinosaur soft tissue. Let's be precise. I asked you to clarify what you meant by that term, and you said 'undecomposed blood cells and other original biological material'. You said this was supported in your citations. However, apart from hardier trace elements like metals (which I've already allowed for) this was never confirmed. Remember when you mistook heme, (an iron-based compound) for actual blood?

For another example, you cited New Scientist saying it was about human DNA. I read it only once years ago, yet I remembered that the article was not about human DNA at all, but that it dealt with horizontal gene transfer, and its prevalance in microbes, thus depriving the tree of life of a 'root'. You denied this so strongly, you accused me of not having read it at all. You said you had just read it that morning. Yet it turned out I was right and you were wrong,on every allegation you made based on that article. You said "an army of evolutionary biologists" agreed with you, when none of them said what you thought they did. In fact you got every citation wrong! Remember when "every cosmologist in the world" didn't really agree with you either? What about when you said that Phillip Gingrich had drawn Pakicetus as a fish?

At the risk of being further mocked, let me quote for you another description of me, one that PZ Myers (who shares your opinion) pasted into his blog. This is an assessment of my grasp of a broad range of scientific topics that was written by a well-received British author after he and I had a lengthy debate on evolution:

Richard Dawkins once said that "if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." It rapidly became clear that Bob was none of these things. For a start, I know a fair bit about evolution and genetics. But when it came to familiarity with the arguments, he was way ahead of me. On epigenetics, RNA/DNA chemistry, and animal physiology, I was hopelessly outclassed. Bob is not ignorant. And it is pretty clear he is neither stupid nor insane. He came across, in fact, as extremely intelligent.

-British Author and Darwinist James Hannam about Bob Enyart

James Hannam obviously did not base his analysis of you on our conversation on your radio show, or any of the myriad things you got wrong there. Every single assertion you made then was wrong, all of them, and many of them were obviously the result of your misunderstanding your own citations. For example, you misunderstood that sponges had a 70% identical genome to humans, and you imagined that a 30% variance in the smallest of a couple dozen chromosomes somehow equated to the whole chimpanzee genome having the same degree of dissimilarity,from the human genome sequence- as sponges. That is a colossal error! Or for another example, when you failed to meet my challenge to produce a single frozen mammoth associated with tropical flora. Instead you crowed about having proved there being millions of buried mammoths, a point which aligns with evolution, and was never in dispute. What about when you said that Francis Bacon rejected naturalist methodology? Or that Gregor Mendel rejected evolution? Or that Lord Kelvin's laws supported a young earth? Or when you thought you could answer the phylogeny challenge without having any idea what that challenge even was? You also admitted to having misunderstood the 1st foundational falsehood of creationism,despite my explaining it to you three times, and pointing out exactly when you were doing it. There is just no way I can look at all that and agree with Hannam on this point. You live in a world of pretend buffered by profound confirmation bias.

Aron, either you're just trying to score some kind of debate point with those who already agree with you, or perhaps you really think that I cannot understand you, nor the dozens of papers I reviewed for this debate.

You definitely don't understand the papers you cite. But your misunderstanding doesn't stop there. You have no grasp of the philosophy of science either. You keep accusing science of behaving the way religion does, of dogmatically supporting a doctrinal bias based on faith, everything to which science is opposed in both theory and practice.

Even if we conclude differently, you might be surprised how much further you could get in communicating your position by being polite and simply pointing out what you think is a misunderstanding on my part, rather than you coming across as just plain mean.

You told me you had a higher understanding than I do, and now you think I've insulted you?! I thought I was being inappropriately polite!

Your avatar is your choice for how you present yourself to friends and your opposition (and even dragging down the LoR standards). I knew that going into this debate. Of course you will behave as you choose, and I'll suggest you consider behaving more kindly whenever I choose. Fair enough? At any rate, more respectful dialogue will make it easier for some of the readers to follow the actual evidence being offered.

I have been kinder than I think I should be throughout this discussion so far.

Just as I'm about to post this for Round Four, I saw that you posted a second time in Round Three. I'm eager to read that.

And yet after a whole month, you still have not addressed even one of the many errors you made on your show, the whole and sole reason we're even having this debate in the first place. Remember that's all this debate is about, which of us was more accurate in our live discussion. Now you were supposed to list any of the claims that you made with me on the air,if you think you can still defend them, and any claims not defended would be taken as concession. You've made no attempt to defend anything, because you know you can't. So your performance in this debate amounts to a total failure. Not only has every one of your aired assertions turned out to be wrong, but you failed to show where I was ever wrong about anything. I'm likely to be wrong about something somewhere, but I apparently aced this discussion where you have failed miserably.

I'm looking forward to getting to Phylogeny, which topic I think will go even better for the creationist side than have any of our exchanges so far.

It's hard to imagine how you could possibly do worse than you already have. If you're ready to concede that all the most points you made on your show ([urlhttp://www.leagueofreason.co.uk/viewtopic.php?p=135892#p135892]listed here[/url]) were wrong, and that you have consequently lost this debate, then we can have a new debate wherein you can show me how your claims about 14Carbon don't really help your case. We can even talk about phylogeny too if you're looking to learn something. But we need to close this debate first, and I think it's pretty obvious to everyone that there is only one way this can go. I doubt you'll concede anything honestly. You'll probably go on your show tonight and sing how you won, but anyone who reads these threads is going to know better.

ROUND FOUR QUESTIONS FOR ARONRA

BE-Question #5, Preparing for the next round, and presuming Darwinian deep time, Aron, If Extensive Genetic Sophistication Appears a Hundred Millions Years BEFORE Any Organs or Organisms that Require that Sophistication, would that be evidence that would:

A) strengthen evolutionary theory, or

B) challenge evolutionary theory?

I have no how you would define something as ambiguous as 'sophistication'. However I have already explained how the genome of sponges and even earlier organisms have later been adapted, developed, and deployed. As evolution at every level is a matter incrimental superficial differences being slowly compiled atop successive tiers of fundamental similarities, then I chose 'A'. If I were to describe things that would challenge evolution, that list would include practically everything creationists ask for to prove evolution.

BE-Question #6, In This Debate Is It the Creationist or the Evolutionist who has offered the more substantive defense of our opposing positions regarding:

- the discovery of dinosaur soft-tissue

I did. You provided the citations, but I actually read them, and found that they didn't say what you were told that they did.

I did. When I asked for clarification of your claim, you failed to provide it. So I looked it up on Wikipedia.

- residual Carbon-14 in fossils,

You made some irrelevant comments about residual 14C which aren't actually indicative of your conclusions. All I did was point out that it is off-topic for this debate.

and - the rates of the deposition and erosion that formed the Grand Canyon

Me. You haven't provided any rates of deposition. You cited another list of unsupported assumptions along with poor observations and unsupported assumptions. I at least showed how deposition and erosion are both interchanging variables, and that each normally takes a very long time.

including evidence, original source material, scientific argumentation, and peer-reviewed support for our positions. Was it the atheist or the creationist who offered the more substantive defense on these matters?

Me. No contest. You propped up a lot of misquoted articles, and you ignored all the articles and evidence I presented to correct you.

As I said, when I was negotiating with Will Duffy over the conditions of this debate, "I find that my opponents keep ignoring direct questions, so I sometimes tack on a proviso that if I have to repeat my query three or more times, then on the judgment of moderators noting that, the discussion should be over by default. This may be necessary with Bob, since he tends to dismiss relevant questions with "I don't care". Replies like that will not count. This is necessary for me to attempt to reason with him." In fact I may have already made this stipulation while I was still on the air. I'm sure I said that Enyart would actually have to answer my questions.

So we've gone four rounds so far, and Bob still hasn't acknowledged any of the many errors he made on his show, nor subsequently here either. Neither has he shown where I was ever in error at all. A pattern has been well-established wherein I have rebutted or corrected all his original claims, and properly addressed all of his challenges, points and queries, yet he has still repeatedly ignored every single one of mine. There is no indication that this pattern will ever change, so it may be time for moderators to intervene. I'll leave that to them to decide.

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true." - Friedrich Nietzsche. "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." - Mark Twain

AronRa, in this round I'm taking on one specific phylogeny claim you've made for evolution, and I'm going to specifically show that, like many evolutionists before you, that you have wildly exaggerated the data to the point of contradicting it. In so doing, I'll address challenges you've made in the last rounds to my overall argument from the chimp's Y chromosome and genomes generally.

Hear Aron's Genetics Claim (in his own voice). Unlike countless working evolutionary geneticists, as indicated below, popular Darwin evangelists like Ra make over-the-top claims already falsified, as here. For you claim, Aron, that everything in nature reinforces evolutionary pathways that show vertical descent as in a branching tree of life:

AronRa wrote:From AronRA's 10th FF Script: "Everything we see in nature consistently adheres to everything we would expect of a chain of inherited variations carried down through flowering lines of descent"¦" hear it

"Because the phylogenetic tree of life is plainly evident from the bottom up to any objective observer who dares compare the anatomy of different sets of collective life forms. But it can be just as objectively doubly confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically." hear it

Evolutionists like AronRa vs. the University of California: From New Scientist:

New Scientist wrote:A UC Davis study, "compared 2000 genes that are common to humans, frogs, sea squirts, sea urchins, fruit flies and nematodes. In theory, [they] should have been able to use the gene sequences to construct an evolutionary tree showing the relationships between the six animals. [They] failed. The problem was that different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories." -New Scientist

The rest of this post will drive this home with a sledgehammer. And because genes tell "contradictory stories," Aron you are wrong to claim that the "tree of life is"¦ confirmed"¦ genetically."

For example, NS reports that:

New Scientist wrote:According to the National Academy of Sciences, "ever more incongruous bits of DNA are turning up. Last year, for example, a team at the University of Texas"¦ found a peculiar chunk of DNA in the genomes of eight animals [including], the mouse, rat, "¦, little brown bat, "¦ opossum, [a] lizard and [a] frog, but not in 25 others [where Darwin's tree would have it], including [in] humans, elephants, chickens and fish." -New Scientist and as presented at RealScienceFriday.com/darwins-tree

These two overviews of the phylogeny genetics research, at UCD and by the NAS, were reported in the evolutionary publication New Scientist. NS is not peer-reviewed. In this fifth round of our debate, by Aron's recommendation, I'll be quoting the popular science press instead of peer-reviewed papers. For when Ra denied the existence of dinosaur soft tissue by claiming, "You don't have original biological material," in Round Three I proved him wrong by providing the web's most complete listing of excerpts from peer-reviewed papers confirming the discovery of dinosaur soft tissue. (That reporting is now continually updated at our Real Science Friday page: DinosaurSoftTissue.com.) So Aron then wrote, "I would suggest however that you would be better off if you read fewer papers"¦" So in this round, assuming all the scientists quoted below have not filed lawsuits for being misrepresented, I'll quote from the popular press and I invite Aron to look for clarifications and caveats in the many related peer-reviewed papers.

Evolutionists like AronRa vs. the Genomes: Aron, you claim that, "the phylogenetic tree of life"¦ can be just as objectively doubly confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically." However, an army of evolutionists who previously made the same false assumption you make here have backed off that claim. As shown through the links below to leading science press articles, and at RealScienceFriday.com/genomes, geneticists have now falsified their own Darwinist predictions. Uninformed Darwinists might disagree with some of the following, but ALL OF THESE ARE FINDINGS FROM AND ADMITTED BY EVOLUTIONARY GENETICISTS:

- 70% of Sponge Genes (12,600 of them!) are the same as human genes including genes for features sponges don't have like nerves and muscles- Mouse DNA is the same as 80% of the human genome- Gorilla genes are closer to humans than chimps in hundreds of millions of base pairs- Neanderthal DNA is fully human, closer than a chimp is to a chimp- Kangaroo DNA unexpectedly contains huge chunks of the human genome- The Chimp Y Chromosome is "horrendously different" from our 'Y' with only 66% of shared genes- The Human Y Chromosome is astoundingly similar all over the world lacking the expected variation- Mitochondrial Eve "would be a mere 6000 years old" by calculating using exclusively human genetic data- The Roundworm has 19,000 genes, far more than Darwinist predictions and 6,900 are like humans- The Banana genome shares 50% of its genes with humans- The Flatworm "man-bug ancestor" genome has "alarmed" evolutionists now dislodged from its place at the base.

Aron, all of this hard science comes from Darwinist geneticists and this post presents a lot more as it proceeds. Genetic discoveries by Darwinists themselves are contradicting the predicted phylogenetic patterns so intensely that the evolution evangelists (like you, PZ Myers, Dawkins, etc.) are being dismissive of these cutting edge scientists and are in denial of their work. This exactly parallels the widespread denial on League of Reason and throughout the evolutionary world of the greatest bio-paleontological discoveries ever, of dinosaur soft tissue, and the harassment of the reporters and the scientists doing the cutting edge work. Meanwhile, it is irrefutable that we creationists have celebrated these and countless hard-science discoveries (14C everywhere, fine-tuned physics, DNA, magnetic field decay, epigenetics, etc.).

Perhaps evolutionists reading this will want to help AronRa by posting on the comment thread that Aron should retract his everything-adheres-to-the-genetically-confirmed-tree claim and correct his 10th Foundational Falsehoods video. For as Aron himself says:

AronRa wrote:""¦if you believe in truth at all, then you should make sure that the things that you say actually are true. That they are defensibly accurate, and academically correct. And if they are not correct, you should correct them. You wouldn't claim to know anything that you couldn't prove that you knew." hear it

On our Ra/Enyart on-air radio debate, I mentioned some of our Genomes that Just Don't Fit. Also, I presented the well-known New Scientist cover story that summed up many other examples of genomes that falsify countless predictions of the Darwinian hierarchical tree of life. On air, Aron misrepresented the content of that article. I'll quote more from it below to document this. But surprisingly, even now in our written debate, he didn't care to check his facts nor his criticism by reviewing that article. Instead he misrepresented it again just as evolutionists have widely misrepresented the soft-tissue dino science. Like Aron, they have been misrepresenting cutting-edge genome science and specifically this NS article. For Aron has now written:

AronRa wrote:"Bob also accused me of never having read the [New Scientist: [ur=http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921.600-why-darwin-was-wrong-about-the-tree-of-life.htmll]Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life[/url]] article even though I remembered what it said off the top of my head, and he got all of the details in that article wrong. The article was about horizontal gene transfer, it did focus primarily on microbes, and was not about human DNA. Nor did it offer any significant challenge to the "tree-of-life" -at least where that pertains to multicellular organisms, and especially animals." -AronRa

Microbes? Not about human DNA? No significant challenge to the tree regarding animals? There's loads more in the article beyond the quotes above, which already argues that 2,000 genes common to humans, frogs, sea squirts, sea urchins, fruit flies and nematodes form contradictory evolutionary trees, and that animal DNA doesn't fit hierarchical descent when comparing the mouse, rat, opossum, lizard and frog to 25 other organisms including humans, elephants, chickens and fish. It's understandable that Aron didn't remember this on air (because we tend to forget information that contradicts our worldview). But it's not understandable that Aron repeated his error in writing, even after he stated the purpose of this written debate on League of Reason. For AronRa correctly wrote:

AronRa wrote:""¦in any live discussion of this topic, both sides may cite points in their favor which the other side is unable to examine or verify on the fly, and neither of us should get away with making indefensible assertions just to sound right on radio. Accuracy and accountability matter more. That is why Enyart and I agreed at the end that we would have a written debate in this forum pertaining to the points raised live on the air. We both made several claims relating to scientific research, and we both accused the other of being unread, out-of-date, or of misinterpreting or misrepresenting that data. Now we have time to re-examine each of the specific points made on that show, and show how accurate those arguments really were." -AronRa

Aron went on to say that I was wrong about "everything" I had said on air. So I'll proceed by presenting more information from the "Darwin was wrong about the tree" New Scientist article. And if an evolutionist proceeds by trying to maintain the illusion that genetics confirms the hierarchical tree, we will see a pattern, for just as they intuit that extant dinosaur tissue is powerful evidence for the biblical timeframe, they recognize that falsifying decades of Darwinist predictions and interpretations of the overall pattern of the genomes likewise helps make the case for creation. I'm not a psychoanalyst, but the explanation is either that, or that strident evolutionists who ignore the Bible's warnings against intoxication (see KGOV.com/pot) just have a hard time thinking clearly.

Remember the Sea Squirts: Regarding those 2,000 genes that formed contradictory evolutionary trees, from New Scientist (subscription needed on these NS links):

New Scientist wrote:"Conventionally, sea squirts - also known as tunicates - are lumped together with frogs, humans and other vertebrates in the phylum Chordata, but the genes were sending mixed signals. Some genes did indeed cluster within the chordates, but others indicated that tunicates should be placed with sea urchins, which aren't chordates.

Biologist Michael Syvanen of the University of California said that, 'Roughly 50 per cent of its genes have one evolutionary history and 50 per cent another"¦ We've just annihilated the tree of life. It's not a tree any more"¦'" -New Scientist

Aron, just like with the soft tissue papers, your characterization of this NS article, including that the science it reports offers no "significant challenge to the 'tree-of-life' -at least where that pertains to"¦ animals" is flatly false.

Quote mining, like all mining, is most profitable when the vein is deep and rich and wide. As I think we showed on air, you accuse a creationist of taking something out of context merely because you disagree with them. And so then you simply allege without establishing the logical basis that I am taking something out of context. So I'll preemptively answer that objection.

New Scientist says that the Tree of Life was "central to Darwin's thinking," and that it was expected to document the "record of how every species that ever lived is related." But here's how NS summarizes the predictive failure of that alleged tree:

New Scientist wrote:"'But today the project [to reconstruct the tree] lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded. "We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality,' says [an evolutionary biologist from Marie Curie University in Paris, Eric] Bapteste." -New Scientist

Aron, of course you realize that I'm not claiming that these Darwinists have now rejected evolution. Of course I'm not saying that. They've rejected the tree of life illusion. They're still proposing ideas for how to explain creation apart from the Creator. And I think you'll agree that no evolutionist has ever presented a single example of any major creation ministry (or from us at Real Science Friday), where we wrongly imply that the evolutionists whom we are quoting are no longer evolutionists.

Multiple-Layered Contradictions: Aron, for Darwinists the story is even worse than the genomes simply contradicting the lineages constructed on the fossil record, and contradicting the other lineages implied from phenetics and cladistics. The lineages constructed by the genetic material alone contradict themselves, in multiple ways. As New Scientist puts it:

New Scientist wrote:"RNA, for example, might suggest that species A was more closely related to species B than species C, but a tree made from DNA would suggest the reverse." -New Scientist

Grandpa doesn't inherit genes from his grandkid.

New Scientist wrote:"And to make matters worse, protein sequencing might suggest yet a third evolutionary pathway, and then all of these were producing trees that contradicted the traditional pathways based on fossil evidence and anatomy." -New Scientist

Yet Aron, by not correcting your 10th Foundational Falsehoods video, you continue to disrespect your viewers by promoting this illusion:

AronRa wrote:From AronRA's 10th FF Script: "Everything we see in nature consistently adheres to everything we would expect of a chain of inherited variations carried down through flowering lines of descent"¦" hear it

"Because the phylogenetic tree of life is plainly evident from the bottom up to any objective observer who dares compare the anatomy of different sets of collective life forms. But it can be just as objectively doubly confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically." hear it

Phylogeny Challenge: Aron, because you are so out-of-date with your scientific knowledge (soft tissue, rapid deposition, misusing statistics,you still haven't corrected your 99.86% fabrication-, genomes that contradict), and because you cling to illusion, I submit that you are not qualified to understand what phylogeny is all about nor to understand the implications of your own Phylogeny Challenge.

To make matters worse for evolutionists like Aron, they compare arbitrarily selected features of our anatomy. But if we look at fingerprints, then perhaps we're close to koalas. And if we look at the human eye, then we're close to the octopus. And 70% of the genes in a lowly Great Barrier Reef sponge are just like our human genes. And NS reports that the University of Liverpool's longtime emeritus biologist Donald Williamson, after "a lifetime studying marine animals such as starfish, sea urchins and mollusks"¦ points out that marine larvae"¦ can be organised into a family tree based on shared characteristics. Yet this tree bears no relationship to the family tree of adults"¦" Aron says that all of this, and everything, consistently adheres to what we would expect from an evolutionary lineage. That's not a scientific claim. It's a bad kind of evangelism. Because being contrary to overwhelming evidence, it's illusion.

Illusion: If you had read The Biotic Message by our RSF interviewee, engineer, and magician Walter ReMine, his documentation might make you more aware of the commitment to illusion at all costs among evolution evangelists. Illusion explains, to give one example documented below, why you Aron persist in clinging to and repeating that human and chimp "genomes are 'almost 99 percent identical'" even though in the same breathe you admit to the more honest "96%" (which the PNAS shows is still exaggerated). Every tenth of one percent difference is another 3 million base pairs that would somehow have to be modified and then propagated throughout the species, in an impossibly brief period of evolutionary time. So Darwinists intuitively try to maintain the illusion that the differences are minimal. But when we realize that bananas and sponge genes, respectively, are 50% and 70% similar to humans, and that the Y-chromosome difference between a male chimp and a male human is a "horrendous" 30%, we realize that decades of Darwinist interpretations of percentages of genetic similarity were unjustified superficial "stories" that are now seen to be evolutionarily meaningless.

The Illusion of Magical Horizontal Gene Transfer: Now that genetic science has demonstrated that the genomes just don't fit, yet another omnipotent blind neo-Darwinian mechanism must be called upon for natural selection to work its magic on. However, while exchanging thousands of DNA letters between microbes seems believable (as it's increasingly appearing, because they were designed for this), to sell to the public the idea that millions of genetic base pairs are exchanged en masse between humans and kangaroos stretches credibility because we all intuitively know that the more complex a system is, the more wildly difficult it becomes even for an intelligent process, let alone a blind virus-transport process, to introduce millions of compatible instructions into the other genome.

So, as with other evangelists like Dawkins and Myers, Aron doesn't like the New Scientist article and is now dismissive of the long-praised publication. But AronRa doesn't even know what's in the article, and he persists in misrepresenting it. Recall that he wrote:

AronRa wrote:""¦I remembered what [the NS article] said off the top of my head, and he got all of the details in that article wrong. The article was about horizontal gene transfer, it did focus primarily on microbes"¦" -AronRa

The article did not focus primarily on microbes. Rather, it used the early work on microbes to show what is now evident genetically for the multicellular organisms, plants, animals, and for humans. From New Scientist:

New Scientist wrote:Having uprooted the tree of unicellular life, biologists are now taking their axes to the remaining branches. -New Scientist

For when they do report that prokaryotes (organisms without a nucleus) cannot be fit to Darwin's hierarchical tree of life, they do so to explain that this is the rule for eukaryotes, including of course, all plants and animals. For example, as also reported in NS and in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, European researchers:

New Scientist wrote:""¦examined more than half a million genes from 181 prokaryotes and found that 80 per cent of them showed signs of horizontal transfer [i.e., not Darwinian hierarchy]. Surprisingly, HGT also turns out to be the rule rather than the exception in the third great domain of life, the eukaryotes." -New Scientist

So Richard Dawkins called for a boycott of New Scientist because the venerated Darwinian publication had the guts to expose the out-of-date claim that genetics confirms the hierarchical Darwinian tree, and they showed this to be widely refuted by evolutionary geneticists themselves, and by leading universities and peer-reviewed journals from around the world including Nature, Ecology & Evolution, Proceedings of the NAS, and Science magazine. At the end of this post, I'll present just a single question to AronRa.

AronRa and the Chimp/Human Similarity: Aron strongly criticized me, claiming that I didn't know the difference between a 70% similarity in gene-coding regions as compared to a similarity in the entire genome. But like everyone who reads journal articles on genetics, of course I am very familiar with that difference. However, why hasn't Aron or an army of Darwinists criticized themselves for their decades long conflation of genes with entire genomes? The false claim, that Aron and many evolutionists still repeat, that humans and chimps share a 98.5% similarity claim WAS MADE DECADES BEFORE we sequenced the human genome. Now that the actual difference is known, how does mutation bring about the 14,800,000 differences between us and chimps in only ten million years? And how does natural selection and the interminably slow primate reproduction cycle propagate all those changes, (what, a million at a time? simultaneously? without conflicts? at hyper drive warp speed?) throughout the species to arrive at the consensus human genome?

So where did the 98.5% come from?

Mary-Claire King wrote:"So what we did in these days, this was by now the early 1970's - 1970, 1971, 1972 - was take blood samples from lots of chimps who were living in zoos"¦ And lots of blood samples from people roundabout"¦ And we've showed using the techniques of the time that humans and chimpanzees share 98/99% of our genetic material.",University of Washington geneticist Mary-Claire King

While criticizing me wrongly for confusing genes and entire genomes, Aron still presents a genetic illusion from out of the dark ages.

The 1.4 Percent and Bigotry Against Indels: To illustrate what AronRa and phylogeneticists refer to as a 1.4% difference in human and chimp DNA, I'll "mutate" some text. For decades evolutionists have avoided counting insertions and deletions as differences, and only substitutions. The following six-character "mutation" (1.4%) of the original 455-letter (and-space) text is what the general public has believed for 40 years was meant by the claim that there is a 98.6% similarity in the DNA between humans and chimps:

In the beginning God created the heDven and the eartm. Thekearth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there bas wight. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morninp were the first day.

That 1.4% of substitutions consists of the six highlighted typos. For a third of a century all other changes, oddly, had been ignored by evolutionists in their public pronouncements of how genetically similar humans and chimps are. But this did help maintain the illusion. These other changes are called insertions and deletions, i.e., indels. In Round Three Aron said they total 4 percent, and for this next illustration I'll go with 4.8% from the PNAS paper, Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%, counting indels. So the actual 4.8% difference would look like this:

In the _e_inning God crWeated the heDven and the epartm. Thekearth was without form, and void; and dbarkness was on the fa_e of the _eep. And the Spirit of God was hovlering over the face of the wraters. Then God said, "Let th_re be light"; and there bas wight. And God saw the light, that it was goo_; and God di_ided the light from the darkness. God called thqe light Day, and the darOkness He called Night. SoR the evening and the morninp were the first _ay.

This example added to the six substitutions above another 16 changes for the 3.4% of indels and the evolution camp with Aron has been telling the public that this is our "almost 99 percent identical" chimp/human DNA. Green font marks the eight insertions and blue underscores (appropriately hard to see on LoR) mark the deletions.

Most insertions and deletions are one to four nucleotides in length.

But some are more than a kilobase (> 1,000 base pairs) long. So if the text above represented a part of the human genome that had one of these longer examples of ignored insertions, the Darwinists would reiterate the nearly 99% similarity claim even though that ignored more than a hundred million insertions and deletions, including extreme differences in the DNA that looked something like this:

This lengthier text has a nearly 1k-letter insertion as appears in our genomes, which would be ignored in the repeated claim of an only 1.4% difference. Yet Aron, understanding his role or not, has joined this decades-long misinformation campaign by still repeating the 99% canard. What was mostly in-house knowledge about indels in 1970s, 80s, and 90s is now increasingly common knowledge. So, just like it sometimes takes about a hundred years to get falsified examples of evolution out of the textbooks, the erroneous 99% is still promoted. But the truth is also presented, often in the same sentence. In Round Three Aron did this:

AronRa wrote:""¦directly comparable sequence between the two complete genomes is almost 99 percent identical, and that when DNA insertions and deletions are taken into account, humans and chimps still share 96% of their sequence." -AronRa

Aron, when quantifying differences, why leave out differences?

There's no scientific justification at all to claim that 100 minus 4.8 equals "almost 99." The only reason to fudge the math is to push an illusion.

Darwinism Has Slowed Scientific Progress: Now that scientists everywhere want in on the bio-paleontological discoveries of the century, all they do is crack open a bone (like in Sue, the T. rex long displayed in Chicago's Field Museum), or go dig up their own Triceratops horn, and they find soft tissue inside. Imagine the century of lost opportunity because the Darwinian paradigm intensely, and wrongly, predicted that there was no conceivable way that electron microscopes would find dino proteins. And consider the wasted decades when Darwinism caused geneticists to dismiss the vast majority of the genome as expected "junk." And consider the more than 100 alleged evolutionary leftovers, that is, the so-called "vestigial" human structures, organs, and glands, including the pituitary, tonsils, and appendix, the important functions of which would much earlier have been documented. (Most recently, having an appendix was found to significantly protect hospital patients from re-infection by a particularly nasty and sometimes fatal germ.) This Darwinian retarding of scientific progress is especially evident in genetics where reality has long been seen to contradict prediction, and so, resisted.

In the 1970s (and in spite of our creationist written and televised warnings to Eugenie Scott as in our debate in the late 1990s) and until very recently, evolutionists were saying that the vast majority of our DNA had no function. Now at least they are recognizing that in addition to the relatively few 20,000 protein-coding regions, there are an estimated 1,000,000 regulatory regions, potentially dwarfing the significance of what Darwinism led them to believe was the only important part.

ROUND FIVE QUESTION FOR ARONRA

BE-Question #7, Aron, regarding your now irrefutably falsified claim that, "the phylogenetic tree of life" can be "objectively doubly confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically," will you retract and correct that statement from your 10th Foundational Falsehood video? hear it

I think it an amusing coincidence that Pastor Bob Enyart, host of "Real" Science Friday posted his reply on the same day that I happened to be at a banquet with Dr. Ira Flatow, host of the realScience Friday.

I also find it amusing that Pastor Bob so often uses arguments that are indefensible, distorted or unsupported non-sequitors, and describes them as 'irrefutable' six months after I have already refuted them.

BobEnyart wrote:ROUND FIVE QUESTION FOR ARONRA

BE-Question #7, Aron, regarding your now irrefutably falsified claim that, "the phylogenetic tree of life" can be "objectively doubly confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically," will you retract and correct that statement from your 10th Foundational Falsehood video?

My statement is already correct,according to all the recent and relevant peer-reviewed science. You haven't refuted anything. You're still trying to twist sensationalism from the layman's popular press as if it says what it does not say. Since you obviously ignored when I explained this to you before, let me repeat it for you here:

AronRa wrote:Your reference to, and reliance on, trite sensationalism shamelessly promoted by a popular magazine will not change the fact that genetics has already irrevocably confirmed a network of evolutionary ancestry for many different lineages of life. The reason I referred you to my videos on caniforme and feliforme phylogeny is because both of those videos prove the point, by examining and explaining published peer-revewed genetic analyses:

If you look up each of the listed citations above, you'll see a series of associated studies, none of which could even exist if your 'understanding' of the New Science article was correct. But they do exist, so my point is already proven, and genomic research continues to confirm evolutionary phylogenies.

"Comparison of whole genome sequences provides a highly detailed view of how organisms are related to each other at the genetic level. How are genomes compared and what can these findings tell us about how the overall structure of genes and genomes have evolved? Comparative genomics also provides a powerful tool for studying evolutionary changes among organisms, helping to identify genes that are conserved or common among species, as well as genes that give each organism its unique characteristics." -Nature (2010)

If these evolutionary biologists are right, then you're wrong, Aron. And genetics tears apart the tree of life, tears it apart. That's why they published a story titled, "Darwin was Wrong on the tree of life". I remember the story, and I know what it pertains to; it pertained to, -it took the root out of the tree of life. No! It took the whole branches, the twigs! No, it took the root! It slaughtered them! Just that!No, you're wrong. You didn't read it. You're wrong. The last time I read it was today. I read the whole article.

Then how did you miss the linked editorial at the very beginning, Uprooting Darwin's tree? In case your subscription isn't up to date, here is an excerpt.

" We now gaze on a biological world of mind-boggling complexity that exposes the shortcomings of familiar, tidy concepts such as species, gene and organism.A particularly pertinent example is provided in this week's cover story - the uprooting of the tree of life which Darwin used as an organising principle and which has been a central tenet of biology ever since (see "Axing Darwin's tree"). Most biologists now accept that the tree is not a fact of nature - it is something we impose on nature in an attempt to make the task of understanding it more tractable."

How did you miss this part of the article itself?

"Microbes have been living on Earth for at least 3.8 billion years; multicellular organisms didn't appear until about 630 million years ago. Even today bacteria, archaea and unicellular eukaryotes make up at least 90 per cent of all known species, and by sheer weight of numbers almost all of the living things on Earth are microbes. It would be perverse to claim that the evolution of life on Earth resembles a tree just because multicellular life evolved that way.

If there is a tree of life, it's a small anomalous structure growing out of the web of life," says John Dupré, a philosopher of biology at the University of Exeter, UK."

So the article says the phylogenetic tree has no root, just like I said. Obviously I have read this article after all, but it seems you have not. Either that, or you glean for talking points rather than reading for comprehension. You should at least have noticed that the article interviewed two camps; those who say that the tree analogy no longer applies if it can't account for all biota, and the second camp, who say the concept of an 'unrooted' tree still works,at least with regard to animals, if not all other multicellular organisms.

I am sure you're aware that several scientists immediately posted harsh criticism of New Science for their deliberately deceptive title and misleading cover art. The article itself is factually OK, but it is unnecessarily emotive and especially confusing to laymen, obviously. It doesn't explain anything as well as it should have, but it certainly doesn't say what you wish it did either. I know what it's really talking about, and I had already addressed these points months before that article even came out.

Did you see Dennet's reponse?

"Nothing in the article showed that the concept of the tree of life is unsound; only that it is more complicated than was realised before the advent of molecular genetics. It is still true that all of life arose from "a few forms or... one", as Darwin concluded in The Origin of Species. It is still true that it diversified by descent with modification via natural selection and other factors.Of course there's a tree; it's just more of a banyan than an oak at its single-celled-organism base. The problem of horizontal gene-transfer in most non-bacterial species is not serious enough to obscure the branches we find by sequencing their DNA.The accompanying editorial makes it clear that you knew perfectly well that your cover was handing the creationists a golden opportunity to mislead school boards, students and the general public about the status of evolutionary biology."

So let me tell you why these evolutionary biologists are saying that Darwin was wrong on the tree of life. Right? Let me give you some of the reasons. This is from the proceedings of the NAS: "European researches examined more than a half a million genes from 181 prokaryotes" (Now I know they don't have a nucleus.) ""¦and found that 80% of them could not be interpreted as forming the branches of a tree of life, 80%. This turns out to be the rule rather than the exception even for eukaryotes, even for organisms that have cells with a nucleus.

At the microbial level, yes it does. However multicellular organisms are better able to protect their genetic core, substantially minimizing occurrence of horizontal gene transfer from 80% closer to 8%.

"Believe it or not, 8% of human DNA is actually old virus DNA. Some viruses, called retroviruses, put their DNA into the DNA of the cells they infect. HIV is a virus like this.-geneticist, Carrie Metzinger B.Sc., Bergmann Lab, Stamford University

The article also mentions the influence of occasional hybridization and fluke occurrences like a snake bite transferring genes. But these events are so rare and easily identifiable that they do not pose any significant impediment to phylogenetics.

The university of California at Davis has compared 2,000 genes that are common to humans, frogs, sea squirts, sea urchins, fruit flies, and nemotodes. In theory, they should have been able to use the gene sequences like you claim, to construct an evolutionary tree showing the relationships. They failed. The problem was that the different genes told contradictory stories. I could spare us some time. It is what I told you at the beginning it was going to be,where it relates to viruses and horizontal gene transfer. No! No! Were NOT viruses!

I guess your copy didn't include illustrations.

"This is a image of the more or less current tree of life showing the 5 kingdoms and how genetic inheritance is now thought to be not exactly vertical but also includes horizontal gene inheritance via at least virus infection and maybe other routes such as the incorporation of mitochondria and plastids as symbiotic partners within Eukaryote cells."

In addition to the description of the illustration, the article also said this: "40 to 50 per cent of the human genome consists of DNA imported horizontally by viruses, some of which has taken on vital biological functions (New Scientist, 27 August 2008, p 38). The same is probably true of the genomes of other big animals."

Beyond that, the article implies that the reason Syvanen could not construct a consistent cladogram inclusive of all six organisms was because of a bizarre case of horizontal gene transfer at the apparent origin of one of them, turning into a genetic chimera. Remove tunicates from the mix and a cladogram is still easily traceable for the five remaining organisms. In fact, we can still even determine phylogenetic clades for most tunicates.

Just for your amusement: "Thirty new complete 18S rRNA sequences were acquired from previously unsampled tunicate species, with special focus on groups presenting high evolutionary rate. The updated 18S rRNA dataset has been aligned with respect to the constraint on homology imposed by the rRNA secondary structure. A probabilistic framework of phylogenetic reconstruction was adopted to accommodate the particular evolutionary dynamics of this ribosomal marker. Detailed Bayesian analyses were conducted under the non-parametric CAT mixture model accounting for site-specific heterogeneity of the evolutionary process, and under RNA-specific doublet models accommodating the occurrence of compensatory substitutions in stem regions. Our results support the division of tunicates into three major clades: 1) Phlebobranchia + Thaliacea + Aplousobranchia, 2) Appendicularia, and 3) Stolidobranchia, but the position of Appendicularia could not be firmly resolved.Our study additionally reveals that most Aplousobranchia evolve at extremely high rates involving changes in secondary structure of their 18S rRNA, with the exception of the family Clavelinidae, which appears to be slowly evolving. This extreme rate heterogeneity precluded resolving with certainty the exact phylogenetic placement of Aplousobranchia. Finally, the best fitting secondary-structure and CAT-mixture models suggest a sister-group relationship between Salpida and Pyrosomatida within Thaliacea."-BioMedCentral

Now you see that only Appendicularia could not be firmly resolved. Can you explain why Aplousobranchia evolves so much faster than the rest?

I know the article. I know what it means. I already told you"¦You completely misrepresented what it means. It's about humans. It's about human DNA. That's what the article is about.

No it isn't. It's about how we should abandon the concept of a single universal common ancestor for all forms of life, or even all eukaryotes. It's about whether phylogenetics has become so complex that it can no longer be adequately represented using the analogy of a tree. In point of fact the analogy fails because there is no root, there is no trunk, and of course there are no leaves. As the article said, life doesn't grow vertically either. Only the branching pattern remains, and that is only applicable to multicellular organisms. Even then, there is still a degree of HGT and hybridization which can,albeit rarely- confuse the tree analogy. However,at least with multicellular organisms, hybridization can only occur between two species of the same genus, so even if it happened frequently, it still wouldn't be significant in any protracted depiction. Personally I prefer to render phylogeny as a tumbleweed of life'. I think it is more accurate, and even more helpful in its illustration of evolutionary relationships at least among animals, which is what paleontologists and other folk are most often concerned with. Envisioning phylogeny as a 'tree' is a traditional convention just like your own 'family tree', except the phylogenetic tree is still a much more accurate analogy than the 'tree' in genealogy.

This is my proof that your claim is wrong, that genetics proves the tree. That claim is wrong, and there are hundreds if not thousands of scientists who agree with me.

No there aren't. None of the scientists involved in this article agreed with you. Just to prove that, here is another excerpt from the editorial:

"As we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, we await a third revolution that will see biology changed and strengthened. None of this should give succour to creationists, whose blinkered universe is doubtless already buzzing with the news that "New Scientist has announced Darwin was wrong". Expect to find excerpts ripped out of context and presented as evidence that biologists are deserting the theory of evolution en masse. They are not."

I suspect that "an army" consisting of "thousands of evolutionary scientists" don't really agree with you just like "every cosmologist in the world" didn't really agree with you either.

If we do a superficial analysis, right. If you looked at an animal that has dorsal fins, pectoral fins, and a fin tail, you'd say, "Look how close they are; the look the same", but then I tell you, well one's a dolphin and one's a shark, and you'd say "they're totally on opposite sides of the tree".In the video for Falsifying Phylogeny, I go to explain the superficial similarities, the surface similarities don't matter. It's what's at the core,where you can tell that an ichthyosaur is a reptile, versus a whale that is a mammal, versus a tuna that is a fish.The ultimate core is the DNA.

Then how do you explain the example situations I showed in the Phylogeny Challenge video? Where genomic sequencing confirmed the relationships determined by most morphological estimates, but also exposed and corrected errors in classifying bats, aardvarks, and pangolins?

How do you explain the fact that every multicellular organism we've ever found actually does file into a phylogenetic tree? As I explained in Falsifying Phylogeny, every fictional creature we've ever made up for movies or mythology holds traits which would violate taxonomy and effective falsify evolution, but nothing we've ever really found have traits that don't fit, or has presented that sort of challenge.

Furthermore, you continue to deny the fact that humans are formally classified as a subset of apes, and you continue to imagine "enormous differences" between chimp DNA and human DNA,no doubt based on mufti-teir misconception of the Y-chromosome- but a codon-to-codon orthologue of greater than 96% is not an enormous difference. Whether you like it or not, humans areclassified as apes, and that fact was determined genetically.

So you read a magazine from 2009 and misunderstood it to mean that genetics tears the tree of life apart. But multiple peer-reviewed articles from 2010 reveal that genetics is still considered consistent when confirming that same tree. Is there anything else you would like to be proven wrong about?

You really should have taken to time to read those articles that I wrote for this debate at the end of last year. It was so rude of you to ignore all of that after it had taken me hours to write them especially for you. Then to have you repeat the same nonsense again -as if it hadn't already been addressed and corrected- makes me question your intellect and your integrity even more.

In this fifth round of our debate, by Aron's recommendation, I'll be quoting the popular science press instead of peer-reviewed papers.

Once again your lack of reading comprehension fails you. I never made any such suggestion. In fact I reprimanded you for relying on popular press, and I said that you should read relevant peer-reviewed studies, but that you would be better off if you read fewer of them, so that you can read for comprehension rather than trying to glean talking points from articles you clearly don't understand.

For when Ra denied the existence of dinosaur soft tissue by claiming, "You don't have original biological material," in Round Three I proved him wrong by providing the web's most complete listing of excerpts from peer-reviewed papers confirming the discovery of dinosaur soft tissue.

Again, I never denied dinosaur soft tissue either. I acknowledged that in the very beginning, but in Round Three I proved you wrong when you claimed that you had "undecomposed dinosaur blood and other original biological material" which is quite a bit different than the demineralized chemical break-down products I had already allowed for. None of your cited articles confirmed anything you claimed. You didn't even get a solid confirmation of proteins. Yet rather than correct your errors, you're continually repeating those lies on your Real Science Friday page: DinosaurSoftTissue.com.

geneticists have now falsified their own Darwinist predictions. Uninformed Darwinists might disagree with some of the following, but ALL OF THESE ARE FINDINGS FROM AND ADMITTED BY EVOLUTIONARY GENETICISTS:

- 70% of Sponge Genes (12,600 of them!) are the same as human genes including genes for features sponges don't have like nerves and muscles- Mouse DNA is the same as 80% of the human genome- Gorilla genes are closer to humans than chimps in hundreds of millions of base pairs- Neanderthal DNA is fully human, closer than a chimp is to a chimp- Kangaroo DNA unexpectedly contains huge chunks of the human genome- The Chimp Y Chromosome is "horrendously different" from our 'Y' with only 66% of shared genes- The Human Y Chromosome is astoundingly similar all over the world lacking the expected variation- Mitochondrial Eve "would be a mere 6000 years old" by calculating using exclusively human genetic data- The Roundworm has 19,000 genes, far more than Darwinist predictions and 6,900 are like humans- The Banana genome shares 50% of its genes with humans- The Flatworm "man-bug ancestor" genome has "alarmed" evolutionists now dislodged from its place at the base.

I see your strategy; you're both oblivious and obtuse, a requisite combination for a professional creationist. When you are corrected on any point, you simply ignore it, and keep making the same claim as if no one had yet told you why it was wrong. But in my original review of our discussion, I did explain a lot of these misrepresented claims. I reminded you of that in Round_1 of this debate, but you ignored it of course. So I repeated the whole explanation in Round_4, and listed that in my summary of the errors you made on the air, but you dodged those too. You still have made no attempt to defend the absurd claims you made on the air regarding human & chimpanzee Y-chromosomes and sponge genes, and are still repeating the same things you still don't understand -as if they meant something else than they do.

For example, what you posted about mouse genes is the same thing I had already cited to support genetic verification of phylogeny. You're posting evidence for my argument as if it were evidence of yours. The problem is that you have absolutely no concept of phylogeny whatsoever. For example, most of the genetic similarity of all eukaryotes -sometimes nearly half of it- is in the basic elements, while the divergence of organisms in the same taxonomic order usually shows only 30% divergence or less. That's why I said the following in part_5 of our original debate thread, the one you couldn't be bothered to read:

You should understand that sharing 70% of a gene set does not mean the same thing as having a 70% identical codon sequence, the way our genome matches that of chimpanzees and other higher animals.

"Genes only make up about 3% of our genome. Yes, you read that correctly. The rest of our genome is called non-coding or junk DNA. Despite the fact that there is so much junk, we still share 95-98% of our DNA with a chimp. And 80% with a mouse. This means that we share lots of genes and a ton of junk DNA." "-geneticist, Carrie Metzinger B.Sc., Bergmann Lab, Stamford University

And the overall degree of similarity can fluctuate a bit because evolution is apparently blind, unguided, and branching in every direction. Thus distantly-related organisms can develop some degree of convergent similarity; its not always a uniform divergence, but the convergence can still be traced for the same reason that horizontal gene transfer can be. We can see the orthologues (which couldn't exist if you were right) and anomalies like that stand out plainly, which they only do because my claim is right. These facts alone account for most of your other allegations above. Otherwise the flatworm is a morphological karyotype, not the actual ancestor of "men & bugs" as you mischaracterized it. Remember I said that genetics both confirms morphological hierarchies and corrects them. Either option would be impossible if your position was right or if mine was wrong.

You don't know anything about Cladistics either. For example, Neanderthals are human; they're just a different species/subspecies than we sapiens are.

So it is important to note that nothing you've reported here falsifies any evolutionary predictions, and evolutionary predictions are not "Darwinian" either. You're still trying to employ your lies-of-equivocation, (referring to evolution as "Darwinism", calling me an evangelist, etc.) trying to pretend that science is as dishonestly biased and baseless as your religion is. You're still trying to project your own faults onto those who will not share them. You admitted that "we tend to forget information that contradicts our worldview", except that you're only speaking for yourself there. Our perspectives have nothing in common and are not comparable. But then, nothing you've reported would contradict [what you would call] my 'world-view'. If it did, my view would change. I am allowed to do that. You're not. You're bound by a doctrinal obligation never to change your mind no matter how often or how clearly you are proven wrong. You're wholly invested in this web of lies you've enveloped yourself in. All your social contacts, political influence, and financial support would collapse immediately if you possessed the honesty that I have. But you don't, and you're consistently confirming that.

I should also remind you that I had previously corrected your misquote regarding Mitochondrial Eve.

BobEnyart wrote:Ann Gibbons wrote in an article, 'Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock', in other words, how long ago did Eve live, Mitochondrial Eve, the first woman from whom we could all say that we descended. Now there may have been other women, but one woman from whom we all descended, and she published in Science that if you only look at documented mutation rates, if you use that to calibrate your clock, she wrote, then Mitochondrial Eve lived a mere 6,000 years ago. ....So I want to know if you think I'm taking this out of context.[quote=AronRa]Definitely! As I said, you have to look at the context of the whole article, which actually opposes every conclusion you drew from this one separated sentence. For one thing, Gibbons did not say what you said she did. Her article pointed out Russian and Australian studies with similar results, and dozens of Swedish studies which were discordant with them, and could not show such high rates. By pooling all the documented data, they estimate significant, inherited mutations occurring once every 60 generations, as opposed to the 40 generation rate estimated by Parsons and Howell.

"The fact that we see such relatively large differences among studies indicates that we have some unknown variable which is causing this,"-Ulf Gyllensten, geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden

"Because few studies have been done, the discrepancy in rates could simply be a statistical artifact, in which case it should vanish as sample sizes grow larger.",Eric Shoubridge, molecular geneticist at the Montreal Neurological Institute.

So Gibbons did NOT give a date of 6,000 years according to 'documented' mutation rates, but only according to the fastest rate ever yet estimated from a thus-far discordant set with no other results that could match that frequency. But more important than that, just to show how out-of-context your quote mine is, look back at what she said prior to that:

"Evolutionists have assumed that the clock is constant, ticking off mutations every 6000 to 12,000 years or so. But if the clock ticks faster or at different rates at different times, some of the spectacular results,such as dating our ancestors' first journeys into Europe at about 40,000 years ago,may be in question. "We've been treating this like a stopwatch, and I'm concerned that it's as precise as a sun dial," says Neil Howell, a geneticist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. "I don't mean to be inflammatory, but I'm concerned that we're pushing this system more than we should."

So Gibbons is criticizing those who count mutations as if they occur at regular rates, when there is no mechanism to provide that. Mutations are random. The Swedish study showed relative sloath compared to the others, and only one of them reached the speed you would need. But each of these is only an estimate based on the variable occurrence of random events in different data sets over short and long-term sequences. Just like I told you on your show, the best you can get are estimates over very long periods with very large data sets. You need additional data for confirmation. On that point, let's look at what Gibbons said immediately after your quote:

"No one thinks that's the case, but at what point should models switch from one mtDNA time zone to the other? "I'm worried that people who are looking at very recent events, such as the peopling of Europe, are ignoring this problem," says Laurent Excoffier, a population geneticist at the University of Geneva. Indeed, the mysterious and sudden expansion of modern humans into Europe and other parts of the globe, which other genetic evidence puts at about 40,000 years ago, may actually have happened 10,000 to 20,000 years ago,around the time of agriculture, says Excoffier. And mtDNA studies now date the peopling of the Americas at 34,000 years ago, even though the oldest noncontroversial archaeological sites are 12,500 years old."

Note that here Gibbons is using the actual documented rates, which are faster than the original estimates, but obviously not the fastest rate,which was the one used to depict Mitochondrial Eve.

That's not allowed to be accepted.

It's not that it's "not allowed"; it's that it obviously can't be right because it doesn't make sense. Is it even possible that the the highest frequency ever recorded should be the average? Or should it be the median of all the available data sets? I know you suffer from extreme confirmation bias, but you cherry-pick the one sentence which you mistakenly assume will support your assumptions, and you reject that very same data even from the same source when all of it always unanimously indicates an African origin for all human demes. You said you rejected that conclusion, but you never answered me as to why. Will you answer that now?

I mean, you seem to be suggesting, (or rather you imply that Gibbons is suggesting) that tribes who are known to have already been in the Americas more than 12,000 years ago, are somehow descended from a woman who wasn't even born until 6,000 years later. We know for certain that can't be true, and we have proven that by multiple means. At this point, I must remind you of a reference I gave you on the air, that of a series of documentaries by anthropologist, Dr. Alice Roberts. These give an easy list showing some of the wealth of data you would have to ignore in this instance in order to draw the sort of conclusions that you do.

So as you can see, Mitochondrial Eve was never declared to be only 6,000 years old the way you say. Nor did anyone imply that she was probably nor even possibly that young.

AronRa wrote:"Bob also accused me of never having read the [New Scientist: Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life] article even though I remembered what it said off the top of my head, and he got all of the details in that article wrong. The article was about horizontal gene transfer, it did focus primarily on microbes, and was not about human DNA. Nor did it offer any significant challenge to the "tree-of-life" -at least where that pertains to multicellular organisms, and especially animals." -AronRa[quote=BobEnyart]Microbes? Not about human DNA? No significant challenge to the tree regarding animals?

That's right. Referring to your list of humans, frogs, sea squirts, sea urchins, fruit flies, nematodes, mouse, rat, opossum, lizard, frog, elephants, chickens and fish, there is not one animal genome you can point to in your list below that does not 'fit'. You can find individual genes that don't fit -due to genetic infection, DNA from HGT just as I said, but the genome as a whole will still align with hierarchical descent. If you'd like to take that challenge, just so that I can prove you wrong again, it will also give me an opportunity to teach you something important about phylogeny.

Aron went on to say that I was wrong about "everything" I had said on air.

And that has proven to be the case.

Quote mining, like all mining, is most profitable when the vein is deep and rich and wide. As I think we showed on air, you accuse a creationist of taking something out of context merely because you disagree with them.

As we saw on the air, and again right here, I do NOT do that, but you make a living at it. Thank you for preemptively proving my point for me. I also want to thank you, Australopithecus and Inferno for showing where and how Bob quote-mined his articles and snipped out portions that he obvious knew would undermine his argument. This again shows which of us is honest and which of us is creationist.

BobEnyart wrote:I think you'll agree that no evolutionist has ever presented a single example of any major creation ministry (or from us at Real Science Friday), where we wrongly imply that the evolutionists whom we are quoting are no longer evolutionists.

Wrong again. There are also plenty of people who say that they themselves were once 'evolutionists' -even when they still can't define what evolution is. You yourself also claimed that an "army of evolutionists" who previously accepted genomic sequence orthologues to trace evolutionary phylogenies have since "backed off that claim". Unless you limit your reference to unicellular microbes, then your statement is a lie. No genomic scientist has ever reversed their position on that where the research focuses on multicellular eukaryotes like plants and animals.

Multiple-Layered Contradictions: Aron, for Darwinists the story is even worse than the genomes simply contradicting the lineages constructed on the fossil record, and contradicting the other lineages implied from phenetics and cladistics. The lineages constructed by the genetic material alone contradict themselves, in multiple ways. As New Scientist puts it:

New Scientist wrote:"RNA, for example, might suggest that species A was more closely related to species B than species C, but a tree made from DNA would suggest the reverse." -New Scientist

Grandpa doesn't inherit genes from his grandkid.

That you still don't understand mobile genes or horizontal gene transfer is painfully obvious.

New Scientist wrote:"And to make matters worse, protein sequencing might suggest yet a third evolutionary pathway, and then all of these were producing trees that contradicted the traditional pathways based on fossil evidence and anatomy." -New Scientist

Yet Aron, by not correcting your 10th Foundational Falsehoods video, you continue to disrespect your viewers by promoting this illusion:

Actually in the video you're talking about, I explained the very point you just mentioned. It's right there in the beginning, so how did you miss it?

Are you talking into a mirror? Your claims about the soft tissue and rapid deposition were both proven wrong, and you're the one misusing statistics.

you still haven't corrected your 99.86% fabrication-, genomes that contradict),

I already explained this to you six months ago, and repeated it again early in this post. There are no genomes that contradict, only genes of obviously alien origin. Even then, even in some forms of horizontal gene transfer, like endogenous retroviruses, it is still possible to use them to objectively doubly confirm evolutionary phylogeny when re-examined genetically. Observe:

and because you cling to illusion, I submit that you are not qualified to understand what phylogeny is all about nor to understand the implications of your own Phylogeny Challenge.

How would you know? What is the phylogeny challenge, Bob?

To make matters worse for evolutionists like Aron, they compare arbitrarily selected features of our anatomy. But if we look at fingerprints, then perhaps we're close to koalas.

Or not, since the other apes have fingerprints just like we do.

And if we look at the human eye, then we're close to the octopus.

Except that we're not because our eyes are built backwards from theirs. Their eyes are of a better 'design' than ours.

And 70% of the genes in a lowly Great Barrier Reef sponge are just like our human genes.

And dispite all my repeated explanation, you still don't know what that means, nor how that fits into the evolutionary model. Let me help you with the one bit you should be able to understand: The fact that sponges have thousands of genes for traits they don't even have is NOT indicative of purposeful creation by any infallible architect. It could be if, -and only if- your divine designer meant to use basal metazoans as a taxonomic template from which to derive descendant clades.

And NS reports that the University of Liverpool's longtime emeritus biologist Donald Williamson, after "a lifetime studying marine animals such as starfish, sea urchins and mollusks"¦ points out that marine larvae"¦ can be organised into a family tree based on shared characteristics. Yet this tree bears no relationship to the family tree of adults"¦" Aron says that all of this, and everything, consistently adheres to what we would expect from an evolutionary lineage. That's not a scientific claim. It's a bad kind of evangelism. Because being contrary to overwhelming evidence, it's illusion.

Yours is the illusion. None of this is remotely supportive of your imaginary magician. All of this is concordant with evolution. As I said years ago in the 6th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism, "according to every ounce of paleontological evidence anyone has ever dug up, there is every indication that the further back in time you look, the simpler and more similar living things appear to be..." In a later video explaining Evolutionary Law, I fleshed this out a bit more: "There are several ways of tracing these lineages, both by genotypes and phenotypes. Phenotypical taxonomy reveals a third method in the form of another trend which could be expressed as a law, but has instead become a whole field of study unto itself: As you track any evident lineage backward through fossil sequences, the closer you get to the 'crown' or origin of any one clade, the more basal forms will resemble projenitors of their sister clades, because the further back you go, the more closely-related they are. In a microchosm of this same pattern, the young of two closely-related species will look more alike than the adults do. ...Of course this trend continues into embryology too." Then I cited Ernst von Baer's laws of embryology, which aligns with Evo Devo.

Illusion: If you had read The Biotic Message by our RSF interviewee, engineer, and magician Walter ReMine, his documentation might make you more aware of the commitment to illusion at all costs among evolution evangelists.

Again you're trying to project your own faults onto those who will not share them. As I have already repeatedly pointed out, creationists are the ones with the 'statement of faith' amounting to a doctrinal obligation to uphold a particular set of bronze age fables as though they were the "absolute authority", such that "physical evidences ...must never be used to correct or interpret the Bible. The written Word must take priority in the event of any apparent conflict ....no matter how scientific, how commonly believed, or how apparently workable or logical it may seem." I told you, no scientific institution would tolerate the level of dishonesty that creationism consistently demands. I told you also that it is laughable that you cite 'creationist literature' as though it were somehow respectable, as if that weren't the least credible, worst possible source in history that anyone could ever turn to, as if that was to any degree honest, accurate, or accountable, and not already discredited by everyone everywhere. For example, it seems that several of the participants in this forum have already done an analysis of Walter Remine's work and are well aware of his published dishonesty.

The Illusion of Magical Horizontal Gene Transfer: Now that genetic science has demonstrated that the genomes just don't fit, yet another omnipotent blind neo-Darwinian mechanism must be called upon for natural selection to work its magic on.

This is another deliberately deceptive dishonest misrepresentation. There is no magic in our analysis. That's your cesspool of nonsense, not ours. The genomes DO fit, and that is how horizontally-integrated genetic infections become so obvious. It's like when you open a Gideon Bible and find hand-written names notes and phone numbers on a couple of the inside pages. The author of the scribbles is not the author of the book, nor do the handful of scrawled comments change any of the source of the other content therein, yet that appears to be the assumption you're making. As if these extra inserts would leave you unable to distinguish this Bible from a phone book. You know better, but you're unable to admit it.

Aron strongly criticized me, claiming that I didn't know the difference between a 70% similarity in gene-coding regions as compared to a similarity in the entire genome. But like everyone who reads journal articles on genetics, of course I am very familiar with that difference.

Obviously your level of reading comprehension is not 'like everyone'. As was already indicated in my post to you last December, which you refused to read, my critique of your arguments, assumptions, and understanding were and are not 'wrong'. New_Scientist isn't "Darwinian". It certainly isn't "venerated". Genetics does confirm an evolutionary hierarchy, and your magazine never said otherwise. All it did say was that the analogy of a tree was insufficient given the complexities of HGT especially regarding microbes. As others have already pointed out, "The problem of horizontal gene-transfer in most non-bacterial species is not serious enough to obscure the branches we find by sequencing their DNA." "Nothing in the article showed that the concept of the tree of life is unsound; only that it is more complicated than was realised before the advent of molecular genetics. ....it's just more of a banyan than an oak at its single-celled-organism base." -Dennet

Can you see it?

However, why hasn't Aron or an army of Darwinists criticized themselves for their decades long conflation of genes with entire genomes? The false claim, that Aron and many evolutionists still repeat, that humans and chimps share a 98.5% similarity claim WAS MADE DECADES BEFORE we sequenced the human genome. Now that the actual difference is known, how does mutation bring about the 14,800,000 differences between us and chimps in only ten million years? And how does natural selection and the interminably slow primate reproduction cycle propagate all those changes, (what, a million at a time? simultaneously? without conflicts? at hyper drive warp speed?) throughout the species to arrive at the consensus human genome?

At an average of 156 inherited mutations per zygote, multiplied at an average of 13 years per generation, that would be roughly 120 million differences accumulated in the same period of time where you can't imagine only 15,000. That's if we ignore the additional influence of population genetics and focus only one lineage without reference to siblings. That's also only if we diverged from an unchanging modern chimpanzee genome, which of course we didn't. So even then it would still actually be more like 300 million genetic differences since chimpanzees would be diverging too, and at a slightly faster rate. Of course the size of either gene pool will restrict variation back down to the levels necessary to still meet your goal within reason.

So where did the 98.5% come from?

At that time, I remember it being described as an estimate based on collective sets. At that time, I also remember Duane Gish(?) complaining that scientists said "the chimpanzee is genetically 98 percent similar to man, therefore it proves they are closely related [but] a cloud is 100 percent water; a watermelon is 97 percent water. So using that reasoning, a cloud missed being a watermelon by three percent!"

I was eleven years old when I heard that, but the vacuity of that argument was such that -whoever that guy on the radio was, he obviously did not care what was really true, and only wanted to create an illusion, so that he could pretend something else instead. That's how you are too, Bob. I know you like to imagine that applies to me too, but I'm not just not like that.

AronRa wrote:""¦directly comparable sequence between the two complete genomes is almost 99 percent identical, and that when DNA insertions and deletions are taken into account, humans and chimps still share 96% of their sequence." -AronRa[quote=BobEnyart]Aron, when quantifying differences, why leave out differences?

There's no scientific justification at all to claim that 100 minus 4.8 equals "almost 99." The only reason to fudge the math is to push an illusion.

Then you misunderstood what you read -yet again- as I was quoting the Christian scientist, Dr. Francis Collins. What illusion do you want to accuse him of pushing?

"Preliminary sequence comparisons indicate that chimp DNA is 98.7% identical with human DNA. If just the gene sequences encoding proteins are considered, the similarity increases to 99.2%."-Dr. George B. Johnson, Biology Professor at Washington U. St. Louis, Missouri

Darwinism Has Slowed Scientific Progress: Now that scientists everywhere want in on the bio-paleontological discoveries of the century, all they do is crack open a bone (like in Sue, the T. rex long displayed in Chicago's Field Museum), or go dig up their own Triceratops horn, and they find soft tissue inside. Imagine the century of lost opportunity because the Darwinian paradigm intensely, and wrongly, predicted that there was no conceivable way that electron microscopes would find dino proteins.

And they still haven't, not that it would really matter if they did. Evolution would still provide the only scientifically consistent explanation, the one that we know for certain actually works and that acheives real world results, whereas creationism has never produced anything positive. Why? Because only accurate information has practical application, and creationism is a perfect rate of absolute failure in all areas. I have asked you many times to show the fruits of creation science. What are its predictions? What are its advances? What are its discoveries? What are its applications? What are its contributions? But of course I got no reply.

And consider the wasted decades when Darwinism caused geneticists to dismiss the vast majority of the genome as expected "junk."

One of the many ways in which an evolutionary phylogeny can be objectively doubly confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically is through inactive genes, genes we simply would not have, and certainly would not share with other species the way we do with, say, the mutation which leaves us and all other apes incapable of synthesizing vitimin C. How does creationism account for that? Wait, why am I asking someone who has no accountability?

And consider the more than 100 alleged evolutionary leftovers, that is, the so-called "vestigial" human structures, organs, and glands, including the pituitary, tonsils, and appendix, the important functions of which would much earlier have been documented. (Most recently, having an appendix was found to significantly protect hospital patients from re-infection by a particularly nasty and sometimes fatal germ.)

Dispite repeated explanation, you still don't understand vestigial organs either? (sigh) I am not surprised, since maintanance of your ignorance and willful misrepresentation seem manditory for defense of your precious delusion. However a vestgial trait does not mean 'useless'. It only means that it has lost "some or all" of its original function. Some vestiges are utterly useless, like the claws in the arm of an emu or the dew claw on a dog. Others have been adapted for whole new functions, like bird's wings or bouyancy bladders in fish. Our appendix falls into this category too. Others, (like our canines) have dramatically reduced function. Once again, evolution provides the only explanation for any of this, while creationism only tries to make up excuses.

In the 1970s (and in spite of our creationist written and televised warnings to Eugenie Scott as in our debate in the late 1990s) and until very recently, evolutionists were saying that the vast majority of our DNA had no function. Now at least they are recognizing that in addition to the relatively few 20,000 protein-coding regions, there are an estimated 1,000,000 regulatory regions, potentially dwarfing the significance of what Darwinism led them to believe was the only important part.

I snipped your erroneously contrived analogy on The 1.4 Percent and Bigotry Against Indels because it isn't worthy of reply. Since we're talking about non-coding mutations, then Instead of talking in hyperbolic parables which reveal your own ignorance and arrogance, I would suggest that you stick to the actual facts, like P.Z. did when we went to Skepticon last year.

If you don't have time to watch the whole thing, just skip to 41:18.

Aron, just like with the soft tissue papers, your characterization of this NS article, including that the science it reports offers no "significant challenge to the 'tree-of-life' -at least where that pertains to"¦ animals" is flatly false.

You're forgetting that I turned out to be right about dinosaur soft tissue AND about your misreading on the NS article. Of course I'm right about there being no challenge the 'tree of life' where it pertains to animals too, and I have already proven that several times above. But I know you have to be shown the same examples again and again because your bias and cognitive dissonance inhibit your comprehension. So let me make the rest of this post extra clear just for you.

The NS article you're clinging to so pitifully never posed any significant challenge for the phylogeny of animals. It only questioned whether the analogy of a tree was adequate to represent evolution. Others suggested that a better analogy might be a tumbleweed, like this one:

This image from iTOL is a computer-generated analysis of 3,000 genomes. The fact that it produced a parallel of morphological taxonomy proves that HGT is not a significant challenge to the tree of life, because genetic phylogeny can still be objectively verified.

In the same post that I wrote for you in December, and which is quoted above. You asserted that there were no authoritative science sources I could cite to show the evolutionary origins of flowering plants, turtles, backbones, bats, fish, or trees. I responded with citations for each provided by paleontologists, geologists, developmental biologists, (embryologists) and geneticists all agreeing with me in peer-reviewed journals. Two of those citations are of particular interest given your continued allegations here:

--> Flowering plants"Our research indicates that the descendants of flowering plants may have originated during the Permian period, between 290 and 245 million years ago," says J. Michael Moldowan, research professor of Geological and Environmental Sciences...."Our work has shown that oleanane is lacking from a wide range of fossil plants," he notes, "but the chemical is found in Permian sediments containing extinct seed plants called gigantopterids."That makes gigantopterids the oldest oleanane-producing seed plants on record, an indication that they were among the earliest relatives of flowering plants, concludes biologist David Winship Taylor of Indiana University Southeast, a co-author of the ACS study."This discovery is even more significant because we recently found gigantopterid fossils in China with leaves and stems that are quite similar to modern flowering plants," Taylor notes, further evidence that flowering plants and gigantopterids evolved together, roughly 250 million years ago.-NASA Science News

In a study published in today's issue of the journal Cell, Weigel and his colleagues report that floral patterning takes advantage of the same gene, called WUSCHEL or WUS, which scientists already knew was essential for patterning in shoots that form stems and leaves. "¦The Weigel-led study builds on previous work in his lab that resulted in the identification of the LEAFY gene as a "master switch" for flower development. Salk investigators had shown that LEAFY itself was sufficient to convert shoots to flowers. The finding not only suggested a plethora of potential agricultural applications, including accelerating flower and fruit production in crop plants, it also showed that flowers were modified leaves.-Daily University Science News

--> Fish A popular hypothesis regarding chordate evolution suggests that an ancestral tunicate gave rise to the higher chordate groups through an evolutionary process (paedomorphosis) whereby structural and swimming characteristics of the tunicate tadpole larva were retained into adulthood. Through this process, the tunicate ancestral line was thought to have evolved into the larger swimming chordates. Modern molecular genetics evidence supports a different hypothesis -- that ancestral larvaceans are the ancestors probably to both tunicates and higher chordates.-BioMedia

So as you can see, the phylogenetic tree of life was -yet again- shown to be plainly evident from the bottom up to any objective observer who dares compare the anatomy of different sets of collective life forms. But as I have repeatedly shown, it was also just as objectively doubly confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically. Having amply proved my point, I see no need to retract it. But you should obviously retract your not-quite so "irrefutable" criticism.

BobEnyart wrote:The rest of this post will drive this home with a sledgehammer. And because genes tell "contradictory stories," Aron you are wrong to claim that the "tree of life is"¦ confirmed"¦ genetically."

According to my family geneology, I am descended of Viking gods. So don't talk to me about hammers, especially after making an argument this weak. I proved my point. Round 5 ends with you still avoiding all my points and queries, and you still have not acknowledged any of the many errors you made on the air, or subsequently here. You're still repeating them, and attempting to introduce new errors too, (14C everywhere, fine-tuned physics, DNA, magnetic field decay, epigenetics, etc.). You can't win this debate, Bob. At this point, it's sad that you're still trying.

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true." - Friedrich Nietzsche. "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." - Mark Twain